Please post comments not directly related to oil or natural gas in this thread.
Thank you.
309 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, March 21, 2018”
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Please post comments not directly related to oil or natural gas in this thread.
Thank you.
Comments are closed.
WELL GOVERNED (World’s Greatest?) COUNTRIES
Denmark
While all the Nordic countries rank consistently high across every index, Denmark inches out its neighbours (and blows away the rest of the world) with near-perfect scores on the ‘Basic Human Needs’ ranking in the 2017 Social Progress Index, which includes meeting the nutritional and medical needs of its citizens and giving access to basic knowledge and communication.
New Zealand
Australia and New Zealand are virtually neck-and-neck across the indexes, but New Zealand scores slightly better for overall political stability, fundamental rights and lack of violence/terrorism.
Canada
Both the United States and Canada rank highly across all indexes, but Canada scores higher in political stability and lack of violence/terrorism. In fact, Canada comes close to many of the Scandinavian countries in its near-perfect scores, including access to nutrition and medical care, as well as to basic knowledge and personal rights.
Japan
Not only does the island nation rank highest in Asia by the World Bank for overall government effectiveness, rule of law and political stability, it also received the highest marks in Asia from the Social Progress Index for its access to basic knowledge, water and sanitation, and access to nutrition and medical care.
Botswana
Botswana consistently ranks as one of the strongest-governed countries in Africa, especially in its role in containing corruption, regionally ranking the highest in both the World Bank assessment and Rule of Law Index. After a string of scandals in the early ‘90s, the government created the Directorate of Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC) in 1994, which continues to investigate and prosecute officials accused of corruption. Not only that, but the national revenue from diamond mining has been fairly well distributed throughout the county.
Chile
Ranked highly for its open and transparent government, control of corruption and access to basic knowledge and medical care, Chile has one of South America’s most stable and corruption-free governments.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180107-what-its-like-to-live-in-a-well-governed-country
Hi Doug,
Here’s one from the opposite end of the good government spectrum.
It’s a BBC documentary about the current Venezuelan crisis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okwMYI3vXzw
It’s enough to make a preacher cuss his mama, not only that the people there are suffering so much, for no good reason, but also because the people of the world who could put a stop to it an a matter of days aren’t willing to do it.
Just how the hell could we allow ourselves to get involved in hot wars in on the other side of the world to have easy access to oil, with vast armies on the ground there, and still allow THIS goddamned catastrophe in our own back yard?
I can’t say it’s anybody’s fault in particular, in the USA and other rich western countries, but allowing it to continue is sure as hell something we all ought to be totally ashamed of, including even the most dedicated pacifists among us.
The simple answer is that the hot wars in the ME were a bad idea.
The US screwed up in 1954 when it helped overthrow a democracy in Iran. It may have helped Saddam Hussein gain power in the early 60’s. Then it helped Saddam Hussein invade Iran in the early 80’s. It made things even worse when it intervened in Afghanistan in the late 80’s, and things have been downhill ever since. ISIS exists because of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Take a look at the existence of normal people in Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc in the 50’s, before the US got involved. They looked like European cities of the time – there were no head scarves, no women covered from head to foot. Look at them now – that’s what “blowback” looks like.
I can’t imagine how an invasion of Venezuela could end well. How do Chileans feel about the CIA intervention in Chile??
The best policies prevent problems – they’re carefully thought out, long term, and not based on corporate interests (like United Fruit…). If the US used it’s foreign policy and corporate influence to support universal education, unions, environmental rules, independent press, transparent democracy…we’d be a 1,000 miles ahead. The US gives lip service to democracy (at least until Trump…), but it doesn’t act like it believes it. If the US simply supported democracy instead of dictatorship, we’d be a million miles ahead.
It’s worth mentioning to Fernando, the Koch’s, and other misguided folks: Both Batista and Castro were dictators. Both Czar Nicholas and Stalin were dictators. Saddam Hussein was a dictator, and Bin Salman is one too. Putin is one. Trump wants to be one. Dictators are all bad, whether they rule in the name of god, the mother country, or in the name of the proletariat. And all are opposed to democracy.
They don’t even have to support democracy. Take Afghanistan. Most of the fighters earn a dollar or two a day. Shooting million dollar missiles at them is stupid.
Afghanistan is some of the world’s best farming country, but the land is severely degraded. The US should just ignore the politics and hire tens of thousands of Afghans to terrace the hills.
They’d price all the warlords of various stripes out of the labor market, and by keeping the operation decentralized an labor intensive, they’d offer no targets for attacks.
My brother almost got killed in Vietnam by a home made hand grenade (an IED I guess we’d say these days). He was guarding a garbage dump to protect the garbage trucks. Well, actually he was asleep in the guard house when someone opened the door a tossed the bomb in. Then they ran in to steal stuff. In the confusion someone stepped on his face, and that somebody was barefoot.
The reason why Americans can’t win wars is that they can’t understand the asymetric threats the world presents. When barefoot soldiers are beating you by attacking your garbage dumps or your frozen pork chop deliveries, you need a new plan.
The Russians realized the nuclear standoff was worthless, so they weaponized Facebook. The only way to win a war like in Afghanistan is to undermine the enemy’s business model, and dropping bombs doesn’t do that. Makework for mercenaries might.
Again, that’s after the fact. We need to think ahead.
We should have done something like that 30 years ago, before Afghanistan was brutally destroyed by civil wars because all the US cared about was fighting a proxy war with Russia, and when Russia left so did we.
Same thing applied to Cambodia, after the Vietnam war. Millions were killed because the US walked away. We walked away because we learned the wrong lesson – we thought the lesson was “don’t get involved”, when the lesson was “don’t fight France’s colonial wars”.
There are many countries with policies way ahead of the US, it’s sad how mean and pathetic we must look to other countries. They often had to protest, riot, or even overturn governments to move forward but they succeeded. Here in the US most efforts fail or only partially succeed and then are steadily eroded by the elite over time. The huge amount of unneeded loss, pain, suffering and ruined lives in the US is our legacy. All to fulfill the bottom line and make the rich even richer, to keep their military well funded at the expense of the whole society so they can romp around the world making money. The US has imprisoned itself and it’s people and stopped advancing decades ago.
Marching and protesting rarely work here and now the country is so divided by propaganda that it can’t tell it’s ass from it’s head anymore. A bitter pill for any American to realize we never fulfilled our humanity or our responsibilities. Instead we live with the gun barrel pointed at our heads every day and be victims of the machines of business. Divided we fall, divided we fail, but we cannot unite without first the government and business recognizing us as living humans not votes or resources. The Great Experiment has been lured away from it’s purpose by power and money, certainly not by anything worthwhile.
Gonefishing,
I often phone my sister down in the States. She is sick about the decline, and quite frankly, embarrassed about how the World must view her beloved country. (She often talks about the “Idea” of the USA and truly loves it). I don’t have the heart to mention she is witnessing the end of an empire and that it is simply what decline looks like.
I just think about the 1.5T in tax cuts for the wealthy and the latest 1.3T spending bill just to keep things operating while the medical system increasingly grows more and more expensive for folks needing health care. Meanwhile, a complex military is being set up to fight with stealth aircraft against another variety of barefoot hordes. In a shooting war against sea skimming missles off NK, what is the life span of a carrier task force? 1 day? Hour by hour?
I read and hear the latest Govt. bombast now run by simple ‘yes men’ for someone dumber than a bag of hammers. It is astounding to me. Astounding. I believe that if there is a sudden ‘constitutional crisis’, (and Mueller may very well be fired), there will be riots and defensive shootings all across the land if it is not immediately dealt with. My hope is that China imposes a plethora of tariffs on farm goods and the red states revolt before it is too late. It is almost the end of March. Will this bulging boil burst over a hot summer of unrest? Are phone calls being made between Republican leaders about article 25 over the break in congress? The problem with that is the Cabinet itself. It would have to be on board and after control has been almost totally assumed with the recent firings that scenario is unlikely. Bolton will goad Trump into ditching the Iran deal. Soon. Iran will start up more activities and more military options. Israel might strike first, anyway.
To think the US was instrumental in overthrowing the Iranian democratic experiment, whatever the stated reasons of the time and in hindsight. Regardless, they meddled and continue to try and do so, everywhere and always.
For oil watchers. Is the closing of Hormuz becoming more likely? I was watching Peter Navarro being interviewed by CNN, yesterday. He quickly remarked that the US was now an Energy Exporter. The implication was net, even though we all know it isn’t true. But the interviewer didn’t know it. I don’t think even the cabinet knows this meme is false. They are all drinking the same kool aid; the Govt., media, stock hypers, and the gullible public.
Maybe our only hope is a sudden Dow collapse and a quickly moving Trade War to bring everything to a stop before events spin out of control? I don’t know? I do believe this, we are living through a momentous time of all things flying apart.
Before you jump on my Canadian ass, I am just as disturbed at the situation north of forty nine, too. The debt levels, unrealistic expectations, effects of Multi-corps on/in our Govt, the apparent disconnect from the realities of making a living and paying for Govt services with tax dollars. (“No Dorothy, there is no such thing as money trees and magical solutions.”) We are all standing at the crossroads.
I fear our solutions will remain personal, and local. But hey, I see the Dow is up right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3HQMbQAWRc
The US needs to back off and start treating it’s people like people. It has been heading into a machine culture and the big money culture has benefitted by keeping the populace angry, afraid and clueless.
Its called “late stage capitalism”– it goes, or you go.
Tweaking the functioning of it is a lost and meaningless enterprise.
Some interesting revelations on astrophysical jets (& typically off-topic):
SCIENTISTS DETECT RADIO ECHOES OF A BLACK HOLE FEEDING ON A STAR
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180319115845.htm
OCEAN PLASTIC COULD TREBLE IN DECADE
“The report highlights many concerns, including the current worry about ocean plastic litter, which it forecasts will treble between 2015 and 2025. But it stresses that the ocean is being assailed from many different types of pollution – including run-off pesticides and fertilizers from farms, industrial toxins like PCBs, and pharmaceuticals.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43477233
But can they brew a decent cappuccino?
NEW 4-D PRINTER COULD RESHAPE THE WORLD WE LIVE IN
“We are on the cusp of creating a new generation of devices that could vastly expand the practical applications for 3-D and 4-D printing,” H. Jerry Qi, Ph.D., says. “Our prototype printer integrates many features that appear to simplify and expedite the processes used in traditional 3-D printing. As a result, we can use a variety of materials to create hard and soft components at the same time, incorporate conductive wiring directly into shape-changing structures, and ultimately set the stage for the development of a host of 4-D products that could reshape our world.”
s://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180321090938.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2IJdfxWtPM
Star Trek – Picard “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot” Clips
Also the reverse-entropy desktop manufacturing device in Heinlein’s story “Gulf”.
There’s a LOT of really good documentaries on you tube, the one I linked above being one of them.
All the ones I’ve watched which are produced or associated with the BBC, National Geo, or any major university, etc, seem to be trustworthy.
But depending on the source, most of the remainder are good mainly as entertainment.
Not had time to view these, only just picked it up.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq0EGvLTyy-LLT1oUSO_0FQ
NAOM
Anyone know why electricity generation from gas fell in the US last year?
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=35412
Some of the answers are in this post: http://peakoilbarrel.com/eias-electric-power-monthly-february-2018-edition-with-data-for-december-2017-and-the-data-for-the-whole-of-2017/
Coal recovered somewhat, and wind and solar grew.
I have done an analysis of coal fired power plants in New South Wales, on the East coast of Australia
16/3/2018
NSW coal power maxed out in hot summer (part 2)
http://crudeoilpeak.info/nsw-coal-power-maxed-out-in-hot-summer-part-2
14/3/2018
NSW coal power maxed out in hot summer (part 1)
http://crudeoilpeak.info/nsw-coal-power-maxed-out-in-hot-summer-part-1
11/3/2018
Australia’s east coast solar generation is replacing coal by only 2% in late summer
http://crudeoilpeak.info/australias-east-coast-solar-generation-is-replacing-coal-by-only-2-in-late-summer
Hi Matt,
You must be putting in a LOT of time getting all this data together. Thanks from me, and from everybody else here as well!
I agree,I the government ought to be supporting solar power.
I copied this out from your last link.
“Fig 7: Wind generation
Installed wind generation capacity is 3,205 MW. Actual generation varies between 640 MW (20%) and 2,850 MW (89%) with an average of 1,650 MW”
I’m not sure exactly how to interpret this. Does it mean the capacity factor for the country’s wind industry as a whole is over fifty percent?
I’m under the impression that only the best located and newest wind farms manage to get much past forty percent capacity factor, and that older wind farms more typically produce around thirty percent or so, on average.
This is REALLY cool stuff:
TAMING CHAOS: CALCULATING PROBABILITY IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS
“The new method can be useful in analyzing any kind of time series, such as predicting a power outage by accounting for power plant production, the fluctuating input of renewable energy sources and the changing demands of consumers. Rubido pointed out that this new approach offers no advantage over some of the existing methods for very simple cases but said it could be especially useful for analyzing high-dimension dynamical systems, which quickly overwhelm existing computing power.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-03/aiop-tcc032018.php
IF YOU WANT YOU CAN SEE THE MATH AT– ENTROPY-BASED GENERATING MARKOV PARTITIONS FOR COMPLEX SYSTEMS
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5002097
TKS, Doug, took a quick look at the math and will definitely go back to study it at length.
I have always been fascinated by the non linear dynamics of multiple interacting chaotic systems.
BTW, Any chance we could make it obligatory reading by all of our congressional representatives? Especially the current head of our EPA…
From the section: E. Discussion: Extension to systems near tipping-points
An important requirement in the study of tipping points is the determination of whether the system’s parameter is before, at, or after the tipping point. For systems with noise, Ref. 32 has shown that important dynamical characteristics do not fully reveal the status of the system. Another well-studied case where the tipping point happens is the existence of multi-stability, i.e., the destruction of one attractor or the complete destruction of the oscillatory behaviour (oscillation death). This tipping results in a merging of manifolds for co-existing sets, causing drastic changes in the partitions. Consequently, our proposed method could be successful in determining the status of the system that can potentially tip
I can think of plenty of systems where this could be applied! To name a few, rainforest deforestation, coral reef ecosystems, Antarctic ice sheets, Arctic sea ice loss… etc.
Sadly, the invasive species homo sapiens was the tipping point for the Rocky Mountain Locust. All done without modern pesticides.
Drought-induced changes in forest composition amplify effects of climate change
The face of American forests is changing, due to climate change-induced shifts in rainfall and temperature that are causing shifts in the abundance of numerous tree species, according to a new article. The result means some forests in the eastern U.S. are already starting to look different, but more important, it means the ability of those forests to soak up carbon is being altered as well, which could in turn bring about further climate change.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180321155319.htm
See Doug’s link above to:
TAMING CHAOS: CALCULATING PROBABILITY IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS
I once did a course on Markov Chains – it went quite easy (chance of light bulbs failing), then difficult (predicting chances of rain/sun, Monte Carlo methods, easy Bayesian logic) and then jumped to almost completely impossible (Gibbs Fields and multivariable stuff). I’ve also read a couple of articles on Markov chains in evolution, they missed out the easier bits and jumped straight to impossible. A lot of it is about reducing computer loads by orders of magnitudes (it was when I took the course and still is despite the many orders of magnitude increase in available speed since then, which says something I think).
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/20/phoenix-least-sustainable-city-survive-water
Sooner or later a long lasting drought is going to hit the Southwest, and when it does……
Maybe it will be possible to build enough solar farms one of these days to desalinate and pump water from the ocean to places like Phoenix.
But it’s not going to happen, if it ever does happen, anytime soon……… and almost for sure not until AFTER a major supply crisis. . that being the way things work, politically.
Does anybody know if desalination plants can run efficiently on a daily basis during the sunny hours and shut down the rest of the time without creating problems….. other than the lost production of course?
It’s obvious that a large part of the cost of desalinated water represents the cost of building desalination plants….. but I haven’t been able to find out how much of the cost of operation varies with production…… the cost of energy, staff, any necessary expendable materials, and so forth.
The cost of canals and pipelines could be amortized on a twenty four hour around the clock around the calendar basis by overbuilding the desalinization plants and storing half the output in a local reservoir to be pumped at night.
Another thing I would like to find out is how much it’s likely to cost to manufacture synthetic liquid fuel such as diesel and gasoline from natural gas, or a combination of gas and coal.
Old data indicates that with oil at a hundred bucks or more, coal to liquid can work, as a business proposition. It might be that with both coal and gas prices down, synthetic diesel and gasoline can be manufactured for only say four bucks a gallon, maybe even less.
I’m not advocating actually doing so. I’m just trying to figure out if it can be done at a reasonable cost if it becomes necessary.
Plight of Phoenix: how long can the world’s ‘least sustainable’ city survive?
Joanna Walters @Joannawalters13
Tue 20 Mar 2018 03.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/20/phoenix-least-sustainable-city-survive-water
Jennifer Afshar and her husband, John, pushed their bikes across the grass and paused to savour the sunshine, while their two boys went to look at the duck pond. Other kids were playing soccer or doing tricks in the skate park, and families picnicked on blankets or fired up a barbecue across from the swimming pool.
“We moved here from Los Angeles, to get away from the rising cost of living and the traffic,” said Jennifer. “When we saw this park, we thought they were punking us it was so good. There’s low crime, the home owners association takes great care of the grass and trees – we like it.”
To look around Anthem would be to imagine there is no such thing as a water shortage. But the lush vegetation and ponds do not occur naturally. Phoenix gets less than eight inches of rainfall each year; most of the water supply for central and southern Arizona is pumped from Lake Mead, fed by the Colorado river over 300 miles away. Anthem’s private developer paid a local Native American tribe to lease some of its historic water rights, and pipes its water from the nearby Lake Pleasant reservoir – also filled by the Colorado.
Not a bad description of the silly state of water policy.
80% of irrigation water goes to agriculture – most of that is wasted, and most of the remainder is used for excessively high-water crops.
20% is residential, 15 of those 20 percentage points are for lawns(!), and of the remaining 5 points, most could and should be recycled (like Las Vegas).
Greater efficiency, optimal allocation of water, and recycling are all that’s needed. Desalination would be far more expensive than just using stuff properly. It’s not the city that’s unsustainable, it’s the water use policies.
Just silly.
In areas that waste a lot of water, it is easy to start conserving water. The whole reservoir/canal system loses a lot of water through evaporation and leakage. Probably be too expensive to pipe it, so in time they may just let it go back to the desert.
Eventually those park areas and lakes will turn into rock gardens and a lot of the agriculture will leave.
When I visited Phoenix it looked like a city built on a frying pan. Not sure why it is there at all. Tucson had more of a natural feel to it, like it belonged there. Still, they have overdeveloped too.
Their biggest resource is the sun, so PV and CSP could be their largest income producer if they get smart. They could also attract a lot of “dry” industry since they will be a power center.
Industry with high water demand needs to go elsewhere.
But in the short run, they will steadily meander into problems and eventually smarten up or leave.
Phoenix is the main setting for “the Water Knife” – #CollapsePorn #Phoenixrising #PhoenixDownTheTubes. pretty good book i thought.
flipping to a random page, ‘ “Well, I got FEMA tents as far as the eye can see, and I just passed a tipped-over Johnnytruck [bathroom truck] that I swear I saw kids trying to hijack, so yeah, it looks like I’m in Arizona.” He laughed. “The only other place this could be is Texas.” ‘
Try Cadillac Desert.
Dated, but more relevant than ever.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/cadillac-desert/id357991973?mt=11
Truthfully, it would not break my heart to see Phoenix disappear like all other cultures who have attempted to live in the region. At least cannibalism is not a major means of support yet.
Try Cadillac Desert.
Strongly recommended as it copiously documents why the government should not be in the business of subsidizing agriculture.
These subsidies just about always wind up in the pockets of people who are already well to do, at the expense of small farmers who actually farm for a living.
Next South West drought might be in progress, it looks like it’s covering a bigger area than previously. Though currently Southern California is getting heavy rain. Who’d be a weatherman with the current climate changing so fast?
The biggest problem in the Southwest is that rainwater is not properly harvested. As long as flash flooding is a problem, the actual quantity of water is not the root cause of dryness. The problem is erosion and soil degradation.
Phoenix isn’t viable.
On the other point, I’ve told you before: the long-term cap on the price of oil is now somewhere between $20/bbl and $30/bbl. Nobody’s going to bother to do anything to create diesel or gasoline when it’s cheaper and more cost-effective to build electric vehicles.
One of the first ways climate change is going to hit the OECD citizens is through higher insurance bills (or inability to get insurance), probably coupled with declining and/or extremely volatile profits in parts of the FIRE industries.
There used to be unlimited liability on Lloyds names (i.e. even the richest could be wiped out in one bad year) but that might have changed).
Chart is for Lloyds from the Times (Paywalled): https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/hurricanes-fires-and-floods-result-in-2bn-losses-for-lloyds-lqzr9cglj
As insurance companies begin to lose increasing amounts of money on those policies it’s written right into law that government makes them whole again, that is, “bails them out.” Isn’t our big bloated government wonderful, always looking out for the most proper use of our taxes?
Lloyds was built on a different model than the usual and customary insurance company we all know today.
I don’t know how Lloyds works now, but in the past, if you took the premium money, you were legally obligated to spend your last dime making the policy good in the event of a loss. So you were careful about what and who you insured, and didn’t take too many chances, or too big chances.
So.. there are advantages to such a system. The people accepting the premium money learn to be very good judges of the risks involved, and it saves a hell of a lot of bureaucratic bullshit being necessary to make sure the money is THERE.
Call it lean and mean.
And no bailouts expected. This model is from pre bail out days.
So far as I’m concerned, federally guaranteed or subsidized disaster insurance should be done away with, gradually. Let’s say the coverage is capped at present levels, and the value of any given policy must be reduced by one percent per year here after.
This would have the effect of forcing people to think a little before they spend megabucks investing money on risky property, in the expectation that they will always be able to get insurance at the expense of OTHER people.
Personally I don’t like the idea of some of my tax money being spent to make the owners of beachfront and flood zone property whole after hurricanes and floods.
And no, I don’t like the insurance farmers get via government programs. It doesn’t do a damned thing for anybody, in terms of the public good, but it puts even more people on non productive government payrolls, and creates layer of useless regulations and paperwork.
Such insurance would be available at realistic rates from insurance companies if it weren’t for hand out insurance. And yes, realistic rates would be a LOT higher.
The fraud level involved is simply breathtaking. I have known growers to deliberately spray their trees…. a whole orchard…… with an approved pesticide that will cause the fruit to simply fall off…… and then collect claiming frost damage. So they save the chemicals they supposedly applied all summer, plus nearly all the ordinary summer expenses for labor, nearly all the cost of harvest, packing and shipping…… and just cash a nice fat check.
It’s not unusual at all , if you are a known local person, to hear growers matter of factly state while having lunch at a local restaurant that they collect YEAR AFTER YEAR, and that they wouldn’t even BE in the business if it weren’t for the insurance.
YOU pay for it if you pay taxes. And if you don’t, it means that much less you might collect in handouts personally.
I never bought it, nor did my Dad. But a lot of relatives did, and all the remaining orchardists in this area who are big enough to bother buy it year after year. The payouts routinely exceed the premiums. Eventually these programs get to be shut down, to be replaced by ….. another one.
Lloyd’s no longer has unlimited liability — it was changed when Lloyd’s failed and had to be recapitalized, sometime in the 1990s IIRC?
NEW INTERACTIVE MAP SHOWS CLIMATE CHANGE EVERYWHERE IN WORLD
“If you were looking at climate change at a scale of a million years, you wouldn’t worry too much,” Stepinski said. “But if you see dramatic changes on the order of a few decades, it’s a big problem. Personally I’m not happy there are people who seem to disregard this as not much of a problem. It is a problem.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180321121600.htm
And on it goes:
US, EU BIGGEST IMPORTERS OF ILLEGAL AMAZON IPE TIMBER
“…. A joint investigation by Greenpeace and Ibama, the country’s environmental agency, has found that the permits hide a trail of fakery fuelling the destruction of the Amazon. In a report published on Tuesday, Greenpeace argues that fraud is so widespread in the Brazilian Amazon’s lumber industry that it has become virtually impossible to separate legally from illegally logged timber.”
NB: Ipe (Brazilian Walnut) is a popular outdoor timber that provides a beautiful long lasting structural member.
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/03/20/us-eu-companies-importing-illegal-amazon-ipe-timber-report/
Meanwhile, closer to home:
THE SENATE TAX BILL WOULD ALLOW OIL DRILLING IN ALASKAN WILDLIFE REFUGE
“Tucked in the Senate tax bill’s hundreds of pages is a proposal to open up 1.5 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling — and Senator Lisa Murkowski [Alaska] is very happy.”
The political map is changing fast.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/trump-gop-midterms/556166/
“As American politics has grown more tribal since the 1990s, attitudes toward the president have become a decisive factor in congressional elections. In each midterm since 1994, 82 percent to 86 percent of the voters who disapproved of the incumbent president voted against his party’s House candidates, exit polls found.
That effect may be even more intense under Trump because such a high proportion of those who disapprove of him do so strongly: An Election Day poll in last week’s Pennsylvania special election, for instance, found that fully 93 percent of Trump disapprovers backed Democrat Conor Lamb, the victor. In this week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 87 percent of Trump disapprovers said they intend to vote Democratic for Congress.
One group has emerged as especially alienated from the president: college-educated white women. The group ordinarily leans Democrat, but only slightly: Since 1992, Democrats have never carried more than 52 percent of their votes in House elections, and Hillary Clinton won 51 percent of them in 2016. However, this week’s NBC/WSJ poll found that 63 percent of them now disapprove of Trump and 62 percent intend to vote Democratic in November.”
“By itself, such a sharp move among college-educated white women could doom many Republicans clinging to their seats in white-collar districts in major metro areas. Reinforcing the danger is the president’s decline since 2016 among blue-collar white women and college-educated white men. House Democrats only won about 35 percent of each group in both the 2010 and 2014 midterms. This week, both groups split about evenly in their congressional preferences in the NBC/WSJ survey.”
“Even if Republicans energize their base enough to avoid the worst in November, polls are clarifying the long-term risks of welding themselves to Trump. With Millennials poised to pass the baby boom in 2018 as the largest generation of eligible voters, the NBC/WSJ survey found that two-thirds of Millennial women disapprove of Trump and nearly three-fourths intend to vote Democratic for Congress. (Democrats had a much narrower six-point lead among Millennial men.)”
My take is that the harder Trump in particular tries to defend himself,as for instance threatening Stormy Daniels with a twenty million dollar lawsuit, and the more Republicans either defend him or ignore his ethical shortcomings, the more younger people are going to vote D this fall, for anybody running for any office from dogcatcher to governor to senator.
I’m about ready to bet that the D’s will control both the House and the Senate after the midterms. All that’s necessary is that the Trump scandals stay top and center in the news, and THAT seems like a safe bet.
At least three or four hard core Christians, REAL Christians, not just Republicans who call themselves Christians, of my personal acquaintance, will either stay home or vote D because of Trump. They didn’t know enough about him previously to keep them from falling for him, but they know NOW.
Such people aren’t prone to publicly acknowledge their distaste for politicians who they have previously supported, but they are prone to vote against them or simply stay home if they can’t bring themselves to vote for the opposition.
When they have the opportunity, they abandon a politician they support for reasons of cultural and political solidarity only like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
This in my estimation is why Obama was able to come out from nowhere and win the D party nomination, although HRC already owned it, it was hers to lose even back then.
They weren’t backing HRC because they LIKED her, but because she apparently had it sewn up. When they had the opportunity to desert…. they went to Obama by the millions.
Likewise they went for Sanders last time around……..This LAST time, she had the party machinery sewn up old time machine politician style
to the point that she scared EVERYBODY else out of even seriously running for the nomination, Sanders excepted.
IF he had gotten started a little sooner, and was a little better known on the national stage, and there had been a few less dirty tricks played, and the liberal press hadn’t been all goo goo gaa gaa about HRC for so long….. he would have won the nomination, and he would be president today.
How about it, HB?
You changed your mind yet about backing candidates detested by about half the voters in the country EVEN BEFORE the first primary is held?
Coach wants to know, lol.
Adults know and remember that when they lose, they look to their own performance, rather than blaming the opposition.
You can’t control what the opposition does in a ball game, or in an election.
But you DO make your own decisions, you call your own plays, you put the best players in each position…… as best you can.
Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump Hardcover – March 13, 2018
RUSSIAN ROULETTE is a story of political skullduggery unprecedented in American history. It weaves together tales of international intrigue, cyber espionage, and superpower rivalry. After U.S.-Russia relations soured, as Vladimir Putin moved to reassert Russian strength on the global stage, Moscow trained its best hackers and trolls on U.S. political targets and exploited WikiLeaks to disseminate information that could affect the 2016 election.
The Russians were wildly successful and the great break-in of 2016 was no “third-rate burglary.” It was far more sophisticated and sinister — a brazen act of political espionage designed to interfere with American democracy. At the end of the day, Trump, the candidate who pursued business deals in Russia, won. And millions of Americans were left wondering, what the hell happened? This story of high-tech spying and multiple political feuds is told against the backdrop of Trump’s strange relationship with Putin and the curious ties between members of his inner circle — including Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn — and Russia.
RUSSIAN ROULETTE chronicles and explores this bizarre scandal, explains the stakes, and answers one of the biggest questions in American politics: How and why did a foreign government infiltrate the country’s political process and gain influence in Washington?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1538728753/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1
Rome is burning as Trump dismantles the post World War 2 American empire. Your uneducated friends will soon learn what real poverty is as they climb the Trump wall looking for a job in Mexico and you still have your head up your ass.
Do you really think this spinning top will last until the mid-terms, OFM? 🙂
I’m predicting a Mueller firing and then riots when there is lukewarm Republican response.
Hi Paulo,
I don’t think things will go all the way to hell between now and the midterm elections.
Trump might fire Mueller, sure enough.
But I don’t think that would be the end of the world by any means. I’m sure, barring unforeseen events bringing about major changes in the political landscape between now and election day that the D’s are going to gain a LOT of seats at all levels from dogcatcher all the way up.
Firing Mueller is going to be a VERY risky proposition. Every Democrat in the country will be screaming bloody murder and motivated to the max to not only vote but to drag his friends and relatives to the polls as well, and the Republicans, with the exception of Trump’s hard core fan base, will desert in large numbers.
I’m willing to bet a two to one that the D’s take the House if Trump fires Mueller, which also means the end of his accomplishing anything politically…….. if he survives politically.
And there’s now at least a fair chance that the D’s will capture the Senate as well. If Trump fires Mueller, I think the odds of that rise from fair to fairly good.
I’m no fan of big government, and I’m not really a fan of cops. My culture, the one I grew up in, holds that you mostly take care of your own problems. So I see them as necessary, rather than as DESIRABLE.
I like my own local cops fine, they’re honest and don’t play God.
But cop fan or not, so far as I can see, is that the very large majority of people in the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are very decent people, and take the rule of law very seriously.
Beyond that, they are proud professionals. They’re good guys, but they’re also tough guys, and I mean tough enough to get into gunfights, tough enough to physically take on the worst kind of bad guys from bikers to dope gangs to the Mafia.
I’m pretty much of a pacifist old fart myself, but I come from a culture that emphasizes macho. I know what it is, both the good and bad aspects of it, and every cop I ever met has some macho , often a good bit of macho, in his personality. You just can’t be tough enough to arrest a big mean drunk without it. And if you can’t arrest a mean drunk……. you’re not tough enough to be a good cop.
Insult such people, make fun of them, make fun of their profession, and of their professional competence and honesty, and you have made enemies that simply aren’t going to forgive and forget. These guys have invested DECADES, most of their lives, to their jobs as cops. They have LONG memories, and they know how to hold a grudge, and how to get the last laugh.
Mueller Ain’t Going Away, lol.
Fired he may be, but if he is fired, a lot of Republican politicians in swing districts are going to have to make a clean break with the remainder of the party that sticks with Trump in order to save their own seats.
My personal opinion, speaking as an obsessive observer of the political scene, is that firing Mueller is just about SURE to put the Democrats over the top, which means after that, that Trump’s troubles with investigations are not even WELL STARTED YET, by comparison.
Of course Trump is a bully, and he’s gotten his way by playing the bully for decades, and he may be dumb enough, over confident enough, reckless enough, to fire Mueller. I won’t be surprised at all.I would bet right now four to three that he WILL fire Mueller, which means firing a lot of people, starting with his own Attorney General.
And if he doesn’t…… well, Mueller imo is going to dig up so much dirt…….. make that raw sewage….. involving his associates that even if he isn’t impeached, that this will set the Republican party back ten or twenty years.
Impeachment is now a very real possibility in my estimation, because I think maybe Mueller’s team is very possibly going to come up with some stuff that the R’s simply CANNOT overlook.
The millennials are going to be voting in about the same numbers as the boomers this fall.
One of the many reasons Trump won is that while the OLD people who voted for him did NOT know him for what he IS, they KNEW HRC for what she WAS or IS, and voted for Trump in order to vote AGAINST her. They knew her from the earliest days of the first Clinton administration. OLD people have LONG memories. They hated her guts, in political terms, because she has done all she could to ram changes thru that they didn’t want.
Well, a hell of a lot of these older boomers are now regretting that they voted for Trump, and they are either going to vote D, or stay home, because they have learned , to their dismay, what he IS over the last year or so.
The millennial’s KNEW Trump for what he is , and they are voted against the R party in HUGE numbers because of Trump. The more politically sophisticated ( well informed) millennial’s also knew HRC for what she is….. which is why SO MANY of them went whole hog for Sanders…. they not only liked and respected him, he was THE ALTERNATIVE to HRC. OBAMA was the ALTERNATIVE to HRC….. which is what enabled him to come out of nowhere and win the nomination she thought she had sewn up BACK THEN.
Hardly any Democrat ever publicly admits that he or she voted for Obama in order to vote for ANYBODY BUT HRC….. but I have heard a lot of Democrats say that in private……. especially older white folks. Bill’s personal habits, and Hill’s staying with him and covering up for them led them to lose respect for her.
NOW Trump’s personal shortcomings have led these same people to lose all respect for Trump. They are of course not often willing to say so in public, after supporting him publicly, but in the privacy of the voting booth…..
I spend a great deal of time with a lot of old country guys who are basically very conservative , and serious enough about their religion to at least pay lip service to it, and go to church once in a while, if not every week.
Two thirds of them have brains enough that they follow the news to the extent that they know who’s peddling the fake news, and who’s not. That two thirds will either stay home or vote D.
The other third is too simple minded to know more than Trump said this or that, such as build a wall, which is all they heard, or WANTED to hear. They will vote for him again.
I don’t see the recent wins by Democrats in Alabama, Pennsylvania, and here in Virginia, etc, as FLUKES.
There’s been a political sea change over the last year and a half, and the swing districts and states are going to vote D this fall…… unless the D’s run REALLY lousy candidates.
It’s tragic to the nth degree that we have had nit wit kids murdering other kids in schools recently, but as a preacher would put it, God works in mysterious ways. These shootings have had such an incredible impact on the country that I think the result will be at least a couple of million extra votes for Democrats. Maybe five million. This is the sort of thing that motivates people to vote who have never voted before.
In the long run, that few dozen dead kids will mean millions of people, from newborns to geezers like me will live longer and better lives, because the D’s will make better laws and implement better policies involving public health and safety.
I can’t remember the title of it, or who wrote it, but I once read an awesome short story about a minority kid who was a REALLY bad guy, guilty of numerous violent crimes, who got railroaded for a murder he didn’t commit.
And the leaders of his people, who could have gotten him acquitted, let him go to the hot seat…… because their people were already outraged and marching and protesting. So they sacrificed him as a martyr, for the good of the entire community.
The murdered kids are martyrs. Their murders mark the end of the beginning of this country’s transition to European model gun control laws.
Average 17-point swing to the Democrats in special elections so far. If turnout keeps up (and it’s rising) this could be a blowout win for Democrats in the House, and in state legislatures and governors’ offices.
The Senate is wildly malapportioned. Democrats may take control of the Senate, but due to the gross undemocratic malapportionment in the Senate, where depopulated Wyoming gets 2 Senators (it should have zero), it’s going to be hard to get 2/3. Perhaps the best move is to immediately admit Puerto Rico and DC as states (which only requires a majority) in order to shore up the vote count.
As if to reinforce the point I made in a comment in response to Joe Clarkson on the most recent Electric Power Monthly post, here is the headline from the March 20 edition of the EIA’s Today in Energy:
Electricity generation from fossil fuels declined in 2017 as renewable generation rose
According to EIA’s Electric Power Monthly, total U.S. net electricity generation fell slightly (down 1.5%) in 2017, reflecting lower electricity demand. Natural gas and coal generation fell by 7.7% and 2.5% from 2016, respectively, as generation from several renewable fuels, particularly hydro, wind, and solar, increased from 2016 levels.
Although natural gas continued to be most-used fuel for electricity generation for the third consecutive year, natural gas-fired electricity generation fell by 105 billion kilowatthours in 2017, the largest annual decline on record. Coal-fired electricity generation also fell, but to a lesser extent, marking the first year since 2008 that both natural gas- and coal-fired electricity generation fell in the same year.
Here is the take from utilitydive.com:
EIA: Gas generation dropped 7.7% in 2017 while coal declined 2.5%
Dive Insight:
There are several major shifts ongoing in the United States generation sector, including the battle between coal and gas and the rise of renewables.
Neither of the fossil fuels posted inspiring generation numbers last year, but gas’ decline was three times as steep as coal. Despite that, retirement figures paint a clearer image of where the market is heading.
The power sector retired 11.2 GW of generation last year, and 6.3 GW of that was coal capacity. About 4 GW was natural gas, mostly steam turbine units. Importantly, however, more gas capacity was added than retired. And for the first year in a decade, no new coal capacity came online.
Gas remained the most-utilized fuel for power generation for the third year running, a sea change from coal’s decades-long run as the top fuel. EIA said 9.3 GW of new gas-fired capacity came online last year, of which 8.2 GW were combined-cycle units.
This was the first year since 2008 that both gas- and coal-fired generation declined, EIA noted. But for renewable energy it is a different story, despite the country’s declining demand.
Wind made up 6.3% of total net generation, and utility-scale solar made up 1.3%, both of which were record shares. Hydroelectricity accounted for 7.5% of net generation, but the resource got a boost from record precipitation in California.
EIA said it “expects hydro to continue to exceed wind in 2018, but wind is projected to become the predominant renewable electricity generation source in 2019.”
In his response to my comment following the most recent EPM post, Joe Clarkson wrote:
Look at the first chart, US Monthly Electricity Production, Percentage of Total by Source. If one compares December 2016, December 2016 and December 2017, the All-Renewables line hovers at 16% or so.
It may well be that annual averages have crept up over the last three years, but it looks like most of that was from a bumper spring output for hydro in 2017.
It will be interesting so see what the December 2018 percentage is. In any case, if renewables were rapidly taking over electricity production from other fuels, one would expect that year on year percentage increases would be evident for any month of the year. Since the peak month for All-Renewables is April, it will also be interesting to see the percentage for April 2018 and see how it compares with 2016 and 2017. It should be a good year for spring hydro in California.
This could be an example of extreme cherry picking, to pick the month that is the nadir for solar generation as the reference point? Why not pick a peak solar month or one in between? At any rate the trends are clear, as shown in the chart below from the EIA which Utility Dive also included with their article.
I Think someone on the last post asked about Solar inverters surviving lightning strikes on the Grid.
Few realize how increasingly HOSTILE the grid is becoming as the old resistive loads you used to be able to afford are “phasing out”. Distributed incandescent light bulbs are – xxx – were excellent devices to shunt Line to Neutral Transients. It’s not just Strikes that hammer devices, any switching or interruption dumps inductive mega joules from primary transformers. Few devices are designed to continuously survive such impact and will fail at an inconvenient and painful time. Solar inverters and Isolated Power drivers like Meanwell HLG series are somewhat “Tough” but will be broken down in time. Critical infrastructure must be isolated and independent from the Grid – ie multi-sourced DC Powered. Transient mitigation is a science and an art. For Starters, Often install TVS devices AT EACH LED driver, AC Branch or Isolated DC Supply point. Beware of junk on the market. Midnight Solar makes effective and Reasonable priced Monster devices for both AC and DC distribution points. Phillips has started to mass produce the SP1 by the millions for inclusion into devices/lighting fixtures. This issue is just starting to get attention. Mommas don’t let your babbies grow up to be grid sucking slaves
http://www.ecmweb.com/power-quality-reliability/nema-white-paper-evaluates-surge-susceptibility-electrical-components?NL=ECM-07&Issue=ECM-07_20180314_ECM-07_742&sfvc4enews=42&cl=article_1_b&utm_rid=CPG04000001991923&utm_campaign=18995&utm_medium=email&elq2=b985b79307cd4c8e81e922a6a23b1ef1
http://www.midnitesolar.com/products.php?productCat_ID=23
http://www.tlpinc.com/products/surge-protection.html
Thanks for that. A lot to think about. I had 2 modems fried, last year, one just as I was unplugging – interesting seeing sparks fly around me! I’ll have to check local suppliers for those SP1s but I have seen the biger ones around.
NAOM
Copper Modems are naked upstream. Option A. Float/Unground the Modem. ie. birdie on the Wire. Against many codes so put it in a plastic Box where it’s finger safe in case you are near during a direct strike. Supply with Isolated DC. Connect to Router with Fiber Optic or media converter. Option B. Media convert to Fiber Optic upstream. Many MikroTik or other Routers have multiple unregulated 8-57V power inputs and SFP Gigi ports which can be fiber / no copper-electrical connections. Fiber is your friend.
Modems, faxes, multi-functions all suffer! Pretty tough to unground with our feed here (linked neutral and ground) while I have to rely on Telmex supplied units and cannot use my own 🙁 I want to move to fiber but I need more information as the installation engineers told me that the fiber is permanently fitted to the modem and all is nailed down while I will need to move gear around for building work 🙁 I may look into it some more before the rainy season.
NAOM
Codes mandate grounded feed on one side to route noise to earth and limit the potential to earth for safety. To facilitate low impedance paths to earth for nonpower related devices, Grounding Blocks are mandatory on new electrical service. A double insulated device can have a 2 prong plug and no equipment ground. An ungrounded (high impedance) wire is an antenna. Expect 1000 volts/ linear meter from strikes hundreds of meters away.
One aspect of equipment Protection is “routing” or shunting transients and noise paths to earth. Another is simple electrical isolation. Many network devices now have SFP cages with can provide total electrical isolation ie. no conductive path. Check out FS.com – 10Gig SFP+ fiber transceivers are now cheap. Fax? Was ist Das? Complexity is not your friend.
https://www.mikeholt.com/instructor2/img/product/pdf/1292448885sample.pdf
Thanks. I’ve saved that document to read later. Fax, some parts of the world still need to use it, only way to get a document to the UK fast.
NAOM
They look pretty reasonable. I live rural and we often get dirty power. I now use standard surge protectors at every important load. Plus, a new Siemans panel with a protector. After my new LED driver (kitchen…. self designed hidden 100′ of LED tape) was shorted about 1 week after I installed it, I replaced and installed a simple inline Surge protector. $140 driver oversight/mistake corrected with a 10 dollar off shelf part. Live and learn.
For anyone who thinks that the Tesla Semi is not a serious challenge to the status quo in truck manufacturing
Tesla Semi Shows Up In Dallas, Home Of Frito-Lay (PepsiCo)
It’s starting to seem like the Tesla Semi is on an unofficial, unannounced U.S. tour.
Just days after two Tesla Semis completed a maiden public cargo journey between the Tesla factory in Fremont, California and the Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, the larger silver tractor was spotted at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis, Missouri. Now, it’s been spotted at the Tesla Service Center in Dallas, Texas.
From earlier this month
Tesla Semi spotted at customer Anheuser-Busch’s facility in St. Louis, MO
The long-range Tesla Semi that was spotted doing delivery runs between the Fremont factory and Gigafactory 1 in Nevada has been sighted more than 2,000 miles away at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis, MO on Tuesday. The massive electric long-hauler was also seen parked at the St. Charles, MO Supercharger, roughly 24 miles away from the beer giant’s facility, later in the day.
A story about the “delivery runs” mentioned in the story above:
Tesla Semi Makes Its First Delivery Run
Battery-powered truck is carrying batteries as freight
The Tesla Semi program appears to be in high gear. Today, CEO Elon Musk released a photo (above) on Instagram heralding the rig’s first real task: take a load of freshly produced battery packs from the Gigafactory on the outskirts of Sparks, Nevada, and deliver them to the Tesla Fremont factory (A.K.A. the Mothership) in California. Just as Tesla had said it intended to do.
Elon Musk seems to be using a well worn strategy of his, using resources developed by his companies to solve problems for his companies. He has looked at his costs for moving stuff between Freemont and the Gigafactory and figured out a way of using Tesla technology to slash those cost. IMHO this product is going to precipitate change in the commercial sector much faster than the cars have done in the private motor vehicle segment.
“The massive electric long-hauler”
Sorry but these Tesla specs are local day cab tractors. Today’s long-haul tractors can carry 300 plus gallons of diesel and a range of about 2000 miles. There is also no sleeper units integrated into the tractor. Also, diesels can run over 500,000 miles before it needs an in frame overhaul. It will be interesting to see how well the electric motors and batteries hold up under trucking conditions going over the Rockies day in and day out.
Acceleration 0-60 mph with 80K lbs load – 20 sec
Speed up a 5% Grade – 65 mph
Mile Range – 300 or 500 miles
Powertrain – 4 Independent Motors on Rear Axles
Energy Consumption – Less than 2 kWh / mile
Fuel Savings – $200,000+
Expected Base Price (300 mile range) – $150,000
Expected Base Price (500 mile range) – $180,000
Base Reservation – $20,000
Expected Founders Series Price – $200,000
Founders Series Reservation – $200,000
“4 Independent Motors on Rear Axles”, I wonder if their mounted inboard of the suspension or outboard like other truck axles ? Very impressive for a first attempt.
Why do autonomous trucks need sleeper cabs?
Good point, but I guess that rises a few other questions. Why do they need a driver seat, a cab and steering wheel ? I guess the answer is that today the technology isn’t there yet. I can see autonomous trucks also eliminating a need for 2000 mile range.
“Why do autonomous trucks need sleeper cabs?” First off, autonomous trucks don’t yet EXIST, except as prototypes.
There are reasons. Day cabs , those without sleepers, mean the driver may have to get a hotel room, in order to park for his mandatory sleep and rest time, and rooms are not only expensive…. they aren’t always to be found near the places he needs to be. It’s impossible to park an eighteen wheeler in more hotel lots than not. No room when the place is busy, the truck takes too many spots, and often as not, the pavement is not good enough quality to drive a heavy truck on it on a regular basis. There may even be signs prohibiting taking the truck down the streets leading to nearby hotels, these are very common problems.
If the trucker needs to park overnight at a distribution warehouse or similar location, it’s going to be very likely that these will be the first locations with chargers up to the job of juicing up an eighteen wheeler. It’s going to be decades at least before a hotel operator will likely install such a large and powerful charger, or allow a trucker to monopolize whatever charger he may have, because hey, he’s just ONE customer, whereas the same charger capacity will accommodate at least four electric car drivers.
And a driver who stays out on the road NEEDS the space in the sleeper for more than just sleeping. It’s where he can watch a movie, entertain a lady of the evening, take a nap if waiting in line to load or unload, it’s where he stores his clean clothing, his cooler with food and drinks, maybe even sips a beer or two….. AFTER he’s parked for the night of course.
Truck drivers do more than actually drive. They have paperwork chores, customer relation chores, mechanical chores, such as removing locks with witnesses present, when hauling secure or high priced cargo, attaching lines to load or unload liquid cargo, getting smaller packages out and into the customer’s hands, etc.
Another reason is that the industry is not yet willing to accept self driving trucks……. which so far only exist as prototypes anyway.
Tesla succeeded in selling electric cars because Musk and his guys understood WHAT IT TOOK to get the customer to accept them….. performance above everything, but also beauty and luxury, in the early years at least.
The guys who are driving ordinary trucks today will move into electric trucks as they become available, and believe me, their bosses will be listening to what they say….. because a happy trucker sticks around, and an unhappy one quits and goes to work for somebody else. The DRIVERS must accept electric trucks before the INDUSTRY will accept them.
I used to drive occasionally myself. It’s something you can learn to do in a few days, if you are in the right place and at the right time, and get paid in the process. When I got my license, you just had to sign a paper saying you had five hundred miles experience, lol. I learned on the farm and on construction jobs, lol. Or you can lay out some bucks and go to school for a month or so to get the necessary license.
Now as far as electric trucks giving good service and lasting a long time…..
As good as modern diesels are, they aren’t even CLOSE to as durable , cheap, simple, and easy to work on as industrial quality electric motors.
There are only two questions that need answered to know if electric trucks will sell like ice water in hell a few years down the road.
Will the BATTERIES last? And will they get cheap enough that the prospective owner can afford the price of the truck up front?
Last I checked, over 60% of trucking in the US, and nearly 100% in Europe, is day runs.
Most of the rest isn’t time-sensitive, and it’s typically cheaper to put it on the railroad and haul it from the railroad yard on a day run. If it’s being sent long-distance on trucks, these sorts of loads can afford to have the trucks stop overnight and put the truckers in hotels; they’re neither very time-sensitive nor very price-sensitive.
Most of the really time-sensitive stuff has to go by air. There’s a tiny market for long-distance team-driver drive-day-and-night trucks for heavy perishable foods, but it’s not significant.
The cost of operations and maintenance for a Tesla semi is massively lower than that for a diesel semi, even if you assume Elon’s specs are too optimistic.
Diesel trucks are going to be an obscure niche within 10 years; it’s quite likely they will have been eliminated entirely, but even if there’s a small corner of the market left, it won’t matter much.
Have you looked at the recent Model 3 weekly production numbers? Tesla’s Q1 financial results are going to be shockingly bad.
From what I have read over at the oily side of this here web site, why would the fundamentals matter? Apparently, Wall Street is still throwing money at loss making LTO operations without any real signs of light at the end of the tunnel. At least with Tesla there is a chance that the enterprise might prevail long enough for the whole thing to actually become profitable.
Tesla is a disruptor. They are in many ways quite different than the companies that have been operating in their market for almost a century in some cases. The main difference is that from the outset, Musk refused to use anything other than batteries as a source of power, no fuel cells, no combustion engines of any type. Batteries or bust! Tesla has the added advantage of not having existing, profitable legacy operations that EVs will disrupt.
What’s worse? Tesla or a whole bunch of LTO wells that will never generate enough revenue to cover their costs?
Tesla’s doing just fine on the fundamentals. The supposed “shockingly bad” Q1 production numbers… are faster than the Chevy Bolt, faster than the Nissan Ioniq Electric, much faster than the BMW i3, faster than the Model S and Model X, faster than the US production of the Nissan Leaf…
A short delay in ramp-up is really utterly meaningless.
And hedge fund manager John Thompson of Vilas Capital Management told MarketWatch that unless Elon Musk “pulls a rabbit out of his hat,” Tesla will be bankrupt within four months. Forbes also has an article out this morning predicting bankruptcy.
They are a lot of people on wallstreet that are short Tesla and doing their best to drive the stock down. I’ve never heard of a company going bankrupt with the kind of sales growth Tesla is doing – it’s crazy.
Yes, of course it is expensive to ramp production, you have to buy a huge amount of materials to make the cars – but already every month this year the Tesla model 3 has been out selling all other cars with a plug (including hybrids).
Interestingly, it’s the Dutch who are aiming to clean up this mess. Yes, the Netherlands with a population of seventeen million.
GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH: SIXTEEN TIMES MORE PLASTIC THAN PREVIOUSLY ESTIMATED
“1.8 trillion pieces of plastic weighing 80,000 metric tons are currently afloat in an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — and it is rapidly getting worse.”
“The vast dump of plastic waste swirling in the Pacific ocean is now bigger than France, Germany and Spain combined.”
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-03-pacific-plastic-dump-larger.html#jCp
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180322123755.htm
Not much really compared to what we use globally each in total materials, over 2000 times as much per day. 80,000 tons is just a small leakage in the system, one that needs to be plugged, but still small. Globally about 300 million tons of plastic is produced each year and maybe 30 million tons is recycled. About seven million tons (or more) ends up in the ocean each year. The global material stream is now of fantastic size, with little control in some areas.
The amount of materials extracted, harvested and consumed worldwide increased by 60% since 1980, reaching nearly 62 billion metric tonnes (Gt) per year in 2008 (Figure 1), some 8-fold increase since the early 1900s. OECD countries accounted for 38% of domestic extraction of used materials (DEU) worldwide in 2008, while the BRIICS (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa) accounted for 35%.1While more updated global figures are not yet available, material use likely remains around 62 Gt today and is projected to reach 100 Gt by 2030.2
http://www.oecd.org/greengrowth/MATERIAL%20RESOURCES,%20PRODUCTIVITY%20AND%20THE%20ENVIRONMENT_key%20findings.pdf
Do we really need to use 8 tons of material per person each year? I wonder what would happen to those numbers if the tonnage unused overburden were included.
“Not much really…”
Tell that to the fish, birds and animals struggling to survive in the oceans.
“The impact of this synthetic tide is pervasive. Increasing evidence shows how quickly our oceans are becoming swamped. From clogging the deepest depths before we have even explored them, to starving the birds that soar above the ocean surface, this is a problem that affects all marine life. But it also has increasing impact on human life too, from toxicity to rising economic costs…
Increasing numbers of marine animals die each year through starvation due to eating plastic that stays in their stomach making them feel full. Not only does this affect marine life, but even birds too! A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that 90% of seabirds carry around 10% of their body weight in plastics – a similar proportion to airline hand luggage allowance for humans. This figure is expected to increase to 99% by 2050. In addition to this many marine animals also die through entanglement with marine litter debris such as discarded ropes and nets.”
“One of the major problems with tackling the plastic pollution problem is identifying where the plastics end up once they enter our oceans and seas. So far we can only account for 1% of the total plastic in our oceans today, which begs the question; where is the missing 99%?”
https://www.theplastictide.com/the-problem-main/
“The impact of this synthetic tide is pervasive. Increasing evidence shows how quickly our oceans are becoming swamped. From clogging the deepest depths before we have even explored them, to starving the birds that soar above the ocean surface, this is a problem that affects all marine life. But it also has increasing impact on human life too, from toxicity to rising economic costs…
Yep, yet we have both the knowledge as to how bad the impacts are and the technology to get off petrochemical plastic polymers altogether. While we are at we should round up all the CEOs of all the petrochemical companies and businesses that produce and market petrochemical plastics and toss them in jail and throw away the keys…
For the record, nature annually produces and safely disposes of, about 50 billion metric tons of cellulose, 28 billion metric tons of lignin and about 10 billion metric tons of chitin. Unfortunately human production of plastics at about a mere 300 million metric tons is something that nature can’t handle… any questions?!
However we do have choices if we want to do things differently. I have posted this link a couple of times in the past.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wHT-FsCJjM
The Biggest Revolution in 3D Printing is Yet to Come
Disruptive Innovation Festival
Streamed live on Nov 10, 2017
Dr Alysia Garmulewicz thinks 3D Printing unlocks a new paradigm in design that allows us not only to replicate how nature designs structures, but also to mimic what nature uses to build objects.
Lying at our feet is an abundance of natural materials that are ‘systems smart’: they are already designed to fit back into a productive materials cycle – the same can’t be said for most of the plastics, metals and alloys that we use.
3D Printing comes with a risk; a risk that we might end up creating more stuff that’s just destined to become junk. Alysia believes that now is the time to seize the opportunity of educating people about the value of a circular economy by creating a worldwide database of local, natural materials.
She will tell us more about the value 3D Printing brings to a circular economy, and vice versa, in this studio event.
Here’s a slight redo of her chart on polymer production.
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While we are at we should round up all the CEOs of all the petrochemical companies and businesses that produce and market petrochemical plastics and toss them in jail and throw away the keys…
You keep up that kind of hate speech and you’ll find yourself answering a lot of questions and placed on various person of interest watchlists.
That ain’t hate speech, it is called hyperbole.
And apparently you are too damn fucking stupid to know the difference!
“Tell that to the fish, birds and animals struggling to survive in the oceans.”
That was mean and uncalled for, just gave some perspective to larger problem that drives the part that is plastic.
Tried to tell them but they would not listen, no chance of organizing them against their attackers. They mostly ignore humans or get away as fast as they can. They can’t seem to comprehend that a creature exists that would destroy the world to have a lot of conveniences and gadgets and raise itself onto little thrones. They can’t conceive of creatures that think themselves highly intelligent yet constantly do the stupidest things.
Yes, we know all about the plastics in the ocean destroying the ecosystem. Thousands of articles out on that, but WTF is anyone really doing about it? I have heard some schemes to help clean it up, but if the plastics still keep getting dumped that will never work.
Meanwhile humans are being attacked by pollution, pesticides, chemical plants and oil refineries, and the very products they use. Many millions die each year plus who knows how much cancer and birth defects are actually being perpetrated upon the human animals under the guise of industrial civilization? How about all the land birds, amphibians and insects with falling populations.
But WTF is anyone really doing about it? Were the worst offenders raided, bombed, taken over by the governments? Nope. It’s all legal if highly immoral.
Huge swaths of the earth are legally poisoned every year in the name of food production. Then they feed us mental swill too, saying it’s all safe as we watch our friends and relatives die painful deaths.
Just the other day I said to someone I had not heard a cricket in many years. Frogs are getting rare as hens teeth here, no snakes, salamanders. I hardly see a turtle anymore, used to see them a lot. Yes there are still some birds here, but much different species and not as many. Bugs, wasps, butterflies, moths almost gone. We have flies, gnats and ants. I get to live in a scenic forested area that is a model for Silent Spring. WTF is anyone doing about it? Nothing. They just keep doing what they are doing and purposely spraying the poisons.
Mostly they don’t give a shit and when the food stops coming they still won’t have a clue what happened. Most don’t even notice the changes or if they do never put two and two together.
I used to support a number of environmental organizations but they all seem to have changed character now, accepting the human footprint and treating the operation more like a business. Sure there are successes, sort of like the success in WWI when you took back the trench you lost last week or still had a foothold in that town being turned to rubble.
Just get sick of it all at times. The massive human footprint is so large now that it boggles the mind, no matter where one turns it’s ever present. No safe haven anywhere. We eat 100 million tons of fish each year, but what is the bycatch and devastation to the ocean environment from that simple activity of fishing. How much fish and sea life ends up being fed to our animals, turned into other products or just dumped back into the sea? How much bigger do the dead zones from fertilizer and chemical runoff have to get before we stop?
If we keep this up much longer it will be quite a silent world after a short period of screaming. Until then I will be quite noisy.
But what can one do? It’s human nature and the small things I do are just fighting the tide. I can dream though, but not too much.
What can you do? Plant more trees, prevent forest fire and quit cutting so many down. A single tree absorbs carbon dioxide at a rate of 48 p / y and releases enough oxygen back into the atmosphere to support 2 additional human beings. With refreshed forests we could save wildlife and get carbon dioxide eaten out of the atmosphere.
Sure trees are great. Forests are better.
What can we do? Stop burning fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow and stop buying stuff we really don’t need.
Repair, reuse, recycle. But it goes further back than that, the manufacturers need to design for longevity, reduce packaging and shipping materials and then take some responsibility for end of life of the products they produce.
Everything we buy sends signals out to produce more, which means that minerals and fuels are mined, ships move, industry makes basic materials, more ships and trains and trucks, more industry makes the final products, more ships, trains, trucks then it gets to the warehouse. From there it gets distributed back to the store where you bought it, using trucks.
All that runs on energy and all those machines need parts replaced eventually, pumps run, lights burn, employees work and need food and transport and new shoes. It’s a giant web just to get a product made.
Most of what we do affects the whole world in ways hard to imagine.
So conserve, do less, save energy, plant stuff, and don’t buy lots of stuff. Save that money for a rainy day.
The Water Is Coming, Cities Are Sinking. When Are We Going To Stop The Fossil Fuel Party?
After the hurricane hit Miami in 2037, a foot of sand covered the famous bow-tie floor in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. A dead manatee floated in the pool where Elvis had once swum.
Most of the damage came not from the hurricane’s 175-mile-an-hour winds, but from the 20-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city. In South Beach, historic Art Deco buildings were swept off their foundations. Mansions on Star Island were flooded up to their cut-glass doorknobs. A 17-mile stretch of Highway A1A that ran along the famous beaches up to Fort Lauderdale disappeared into the Atlantic.
The storm knocked out the wastewater treatment plant on Virginia Key, forcing the city to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay. Tampons and condoms littered the beaches, and the stench of human excrement stoked fears of cholera.
More than 300 people died, many of them swept away by the surging waters that submerged much of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale; 13 people were killed in traffic accidents as they scrambled to escape the city after the news spread — falsely, it turned out — that one of the nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, an aging power plant 24 miles south of Miami, had been heavily damaged by the surge and had sent a radioactive cloud floating over the city.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sea-levels-fossil-fuel_us_5ab395cee4b008c9e5f48fd9
The majority of advancement and development of humanity’s scientific knowledge during the previous century has been driven by capitalism and the profit motive. Drug companies invest enormously into R&D. Likewise the oil and gas industry invests for the same reason, and that is the ability to create wealth. There is research into solar, wind, hydrogen as well with the rationale being to make money. When this new technology is ripe and economically viable you will see it flowing into the marketplace. Your doomsday fanfiction doesn’t take into account the realities of free enterprise or the concept of societal improvement through the profit motive.
There is research into solar, wind, hydrogen as well with the rationale being to make money.
That would be nice, but…how do solar & wind power producers profit from preventing pollution and climate change?
Those are externalities that are presumably being significantly and willfully exaggerated, in any case.
Ah, so you don’t really believe that the profit motive will prevent Florida from being flooded – you just don’t accept the scientific consensus on climate change.
Hmmm. Do you accept evolution?
Real science should never be about obtaining consensus. A good lesson in why is the history of asteroid research. The original consensus held that they could not strike the earth, but then one year came where one lone voice set out to investigate the truth.
Fundamentally, consensus is a measure of societal pressure, and societal pressure isn’t much more than an indication of how much pressure the peer group applies to those who can think for themselves. Remember Galileo? Consensus put him in jail.
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So…do you accept evolution?
“The Water Is Coming, Cities Are Sinking. When Are We Going To Stop The Fossil Fuel Party?”
It’s hot time on the old planet tonight! Stop the fossil fuel party? No way.
After it’s done romping round the world like an ugly whack-a-mole, maybe. As “more advanced” areas slow down their use the less developed ones take it up. As markets dry up in one place, export it elsewhere. No laws against it really, so on it will go until the wells run dry and the mines fill with water.
Instead, let’s let the market forces run the show and see how they do. They put us in this position so automatically market forces will now save us from ourselves, won’t they?
Fossil fuels uber alles! That means it’s all around you in the air. Take a deep breath and smell the fossil fuels. There are millions of years of pre-history in the air now, so back to the past we go and Make the World Great Again!
sarc
Then they will just rebuild it just as it was before. Then wonder why it happens all over again.
NAOM
IF THE GIANT SPIDERS DON’T GET YOU, THE WARM SUMMERS WILL
A new study by the Australia Institute paints a dire future for the continent, with an increasing number of days so hot it’s considered a health risk to go outside. The study’s authors warn there will be a “range of consequences” to Australia’s extended periods of extreme heat, including more intense storms, increased flood risk and changes to mosquito populations and the spread of infectious disease.
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/warming-temperatures-in-darwin-australia-a-hazard-to-human-health-the-australia-institute/97870/
Darwin? It’s just natural selection at work.
I grew up with big venomous spiders as a kid in Brazil. I just learned about their habitat and behavior and left them alone, never had a problem. On a few occasions I even managed to save a few of them from certain death at the hands of stupid panicked arachnophobes… As for the hot summers, that will kill the big spiders as well as the arachnophobes.
Really? The spiders can’t hide from the heat? I don’t see them drying out at high humidity and they don’t produce heat themselves like we do. So what is the mechanism that kills them?
We determined the range of thermal conditions encountered by spiders, their temperature tolerance and the influence of temperature on foraging activity and prey handling behavior. The environmental temperatures available to Seothyra vary from 17–33° C at the coolest time of day to 33–73° C at the hottest. When prevented from retreating into burrows, spiders showed signs of thermal stress at about 49° C, whereas unrestrained spiders continued to forage at web temperatures above 65° C by moving between the hot surface mat and the cooler burrow. Spiders responded quicker to prey stimuli during the hot hours of the day and completed prey capture sequences in significantly less time at surface temperatures above 49° C than below.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00328161
Really? The spiders can’t hide from the heat? I don’t see them drying out at high humidity and they don’t produce heat themselves like we do. So what is the mechanism that kills them?
Yes, really! While the increase in heat may not kill them directly, the changes in climate effect the ecosystems on which they depend on for food…
Maybe you don’t believe that the 6th mass extinction is real?
On the other hand the tiny spiders of the far north might yet evolve into giants again…
http://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/n0397-city-invaded-by-8-eyed-tarantulaknown-as-wolf-spider/
Residents of the drought-hit capital of Buryatia have complained of an influx of a mysterious spider seldom seen before in the city. It has been identified as the exotic-looking Lycosa singoriensis wolf spider – the largest Central European spider – also known as the South Russian tarantula.
Locals have shared pictures of the creature, the arrival of which is linked to the hot and dry conditions throughout the summer. The invading spider has a venomous bite and can pierce human skin with its claws, but it is unlikely to cause serious problems for humans.
Who knows maybe someone can transplant the deadly Brazilian Banana spider to Siberia. It might like the Siberian Trump Towers…
“Yes, really! While the increase in heat may not kill them directly, the changes in climate effect the ecosystems on which they depend on for food…
Maybe you don’t believe that the 6th mass extinction is real?
”
ROFL
No Fred, I do not believe in the Sixth Extinction in a biblical or apocryphal way. What I do think or believe is that there are physical reasons for the reduction and extinction of species. What I do know about the insect and arachnid world lends me to “believe” that they will generally survive and extend their ranges in a warming world if the other extinction drivers disappear.
The paleo record shows these amazing creatures with their own chemical factories have lasted through many extinction events.
You see the Sixth Extinction is, so far, not primarily caused by climate change. The primary drivers have been over-hunting, pollution, toxification (pesticides, herbicides), development/habitat destruction, and overfishing. I think that temperature and ocean acidification are just lately having an effect that may become a primary driver in the future, and the only cause that becomes unhinged from direct human intervention.
So no I don’t believe in the Sixth Extinction, I think the evidence shows we are in a large extinction event that is caused by human activity. I believe we are drastically reducing insect populations across some regions and areas of the world and that their spider predators will reduce in those areas. I do not yet believe that it is a global event, although it might come to that in the future if humans keep on doing what they do best.
A warmer world is a happier world for bugs and spiders, up to a point. It’s the humans and their animals that are in mortal danger from temperature rise.
The scary part is that the extreme stress in the future might change homo sapiens and then who knows what we will get. Homo sapiens sapiens II, the destroyer of galaxies! It’s all just a mutation away.
Brown recluse spider: Range could expand in N. America with changing climate
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110421212230.htm
Then just a few years after that report:
https://patch.com/pennsylvania/doylestown/venomous-spider-invasion-closes-elementary-school-pennsylvania
So no I don’t believe in the Sixth Extinction, I think the evidence shows we are in a large extinction event that is caused by human activity.
Well hell, are you saying that because it is caused by human activity then it does not count as a major extinction event, the sixth major extinction event? Extinction is extinction, regardless of the cause.
The Holocene Extinction
The Holocene extinction, otherwise referred to as the Sixth extinction or Anthropocene extinction, is the ongoing extinction event of species during the present Holocene epoch, mainly as a result of human activity. The large number of extinctions spans numerous families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and arthropods. With widespread degradation of highly biodiverse habitats such as coral reefs and rainforest, as well as other areas, the vast majority of these extinctions is thought to be undocumented. The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background rates.
And I will add that this extinction event will very likely end up being at least the third largest extinction event of all time, behind only the Permian Extinction and the KT Extinction. That is because we can see no end to this, the Anthropocene Extinction. It will just continue to get worse and worse.
THE EXTINCTION CRISIS
Unlike past mass extinctions, caused by events like asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, and natural climate shifts, the current crisis is almost entirely caused by us — humans. In fact, 99 percent of currently threatened species are at risk from human activities, primarily those driving habitat loss, introduction of exotic species, and global warming. Because the rate of change in our biosphere is increasing, and because every species’ extinction potentially leads to the extinction of others bound to that species in a complex ecological web, numbers of extinctions are likely to snowball in the coming decades as ecosystems unravel.
“Well hell, are you saying that because it is caused by human activity then it does not count as a major extinction event, the sixth major extinction event? Extinction is extinction, regardless of the cause.”
Having fun taking things out of context Ron. 🙂
Maybe a local fire is the same as a massive forest fire in your book but I tend to look at things in a bit more detail.
Global massive extinction events or even some of the more minor extinction events were driven by natural forces over very long periods of time. With the exception of a large asteroid strike. Still, none of the extinction events were caused by extremely short term biological phenomenon. They were geological in nature and time.
In this case the human animal is the primary cause of extinction, starting 70,000 years ago but mostly in the last two centuries.
Since you strongly believe we are in for a collapse soon, how can the extinction proceed without it’s main driver, human civilization?
See the difference, the latest extinction can turn on quickly and turn off quickly because it has a totally different type of cause, human intelligence?
In order to be a major extinction event it would have to proceed much further into the future. Do you see civilization proceeding much further into the future?
In order to be a major extinction event it would have to proceed much further into the future. Do you see civilization proceeding much further into the future?
No, no, no, that is simply not correct. The time element has little to do with it. It is the percentage of flora and fauna, mostly fauna, that goes extinct is what classifies it as a major extinct event.
Since you strongly believe we are in for a collapse soon, how can the extinction proceed without it’s main driver, human civilization?
Yes, there will be a collapse of human civilizations and a mega drop in human population. The population decline will be primarily caused by starvation. Starving people will eat anything, snakes, bugs, and any animal they can catch or trap. I have said it before, when the collapse comes we will eat the songbirds out of the trees.
The collapse will lead to a massive collapse of all types of animals, especially those made out of meat. We will eat them all.
The collapse will be the cause of a huge spike in the species extinction of all megafauna, most smaller mammals as well as amphibians and fish. Insects will likely fare better. Most species of rats and mice will survive. But 100% of all megafauna will go extinct and perhaps 60 to 70% of all medium size fauna.
A side note. I recently read a long article on the deaths of approximately 35 million Chinese during Mao’s Great Leap Forward. They died of starvation. The article said many died of constipation from eating mud in an attempt to quell their hunger pains.
Well, the fossil record is highly constipated too, with only a very small sub-percentage of species that existed even present in the record. Maybe if people understood that when they speak about mass extinctions, they speak about the fossil record.
A rough estimate is 0.01 percent of all species actually show up in the fossil record.
So, yes we have lost half the megafauna of the Pleistocene by the time civilizations started and yes we are losing lots of species now, but so far it would hardly dent the fossil record.
So how much of this loss would actually show in a fossil record?
The fossil record is incredibly incomplete. One rough estimate holds that we’ve only ever found a tantalizing 0.01 percent of all the species that have ever existed. Most of the animals in the fossil record are marine invertebrates, like brachiopods and bivalves, of the sort that are both geologically widespread and durably skeletonized. In fact, though this book (for narrative purposes) has mostly focused on the charismatic animals taken out by mass extinctions, the only reason we know about mass extinctions in the first place is from the record of this incredibly abundant, durable, and diverse world of marine invertebrates, not the big, charismatic, and rare stuff like dinosaurs.
“So you can ask, ‘Okay, well, how many geographically widespread, abundant, durably skeletonized marine taxa have gone extinct thus far?’ And the answer is, pretty close to zero,” Erwin pointed out. In fact, of the best-assessed groups of modern animals—like stony corals, amphibians, birds and mammals—somewhere between 0 and 1 percent of species have gone extinct in recent human history. By comparison, the hellscape of End-Permian mass extinction claimed upwards of 90 percent of all species on earth.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends-of-the-world/529545/
So if you want to talk mass extinction event, get your perspective in line and realize you need to compare it to actual mass extinction records and what they actually mean.
We are in an extinction event, but it is so far barely a small blip compared to actual mass extinctions of the past. It would barely show in the fossil record.
Not saying it couldn’t proceed there, say if we have full scale nuclear war or the methane clathrate bodies really start to melt. Killing off most of the bugs in large regions is a very bad idea for us, but there are still large areas with lots of insect life so recovery will occur once we eliminate ourselves.
As Doug Erwin explains, if we were in a mass extinction event, all is lost.
Hope that explanation and article clears things up a bit and gives some perspective to what a mass extinction event really means. Mass extinctions are full on over the edge past the tipping point things, an ecological avalanche.
Mass extinctions are full on over the edge past the tipping point things, an ecological avalanche.
Oh! You mean like what’s happening right now?
From my essay Of Fossil Fuels and Human Destiny
10,000 years ago humans and their animals represented less than one tenth of one percent of the land and air vertebrate biomass of the earth. Now they are 97 percent.
And if you think that is not a mass extinction then you have no idea what the term means.
Did you even read the article? You are disagreeing with the scientific findings.
OK, I get it.
ROFL
No Fred, I do not believe in the Sixth Extinction in a biblical or apocryphal way. What I do think or believe is that there are physical reasons for the reduction and extinction of species. What I do know about the insect and arachnid world lends me to “believe” that they will generally survive and extend their ranges in a warming world if the other extinction drivers disappear.
Ok, as far as BELIEVING in anything in a biblical or apocryphal way might be concerned, given that I know you are a scientist, I would certainly expect that at the very least you would think scientifically. Now having said that, I’m not quite sure what it is, that has led you to believe that insects and arachnids will generally survive and extend their ranges in a warming world.
First it is a rather bold assumption IMO, to state that if the other extinction drivers, whatever they may be, should suddenly disappear, that everything will be just fine and things will quickly revert to normal. That isn’t how major extinction events in the past have unfolded and we do know a thing or two about that. Once multiple tipping points are passed things become very chaotic and it takes a very long time for things settle down to a point where speciation and natural selection can get back into the full swing of things. During these multi million year periods a lot of things can and do happen. Including entire branches of the tree of life being drastically pruned. Some lost forever.
This paper gives a pretty good idea of the time periods involved.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1475
The timing and pattern of biotic recovery following the end-Permian mass extinction
Zhong-Qiang Chen & Michael J. Benton
Nature Geoscience volume 5, pages 375–383 (2012)
doi:10.1038/ngeo1475
Download Citation
BiodiversityEvolutionary ecologyPalaeontology
Published:
27 May 2012
Abstract
The aftermath of the great end-Permian period mass extinction 252 Myr ago shows how life can recover from the loss of >90% species globally. The crisis was triggered by a number of physical environmental shocks (global warming, acid rain, ocean acidification and ocean anoxia), and some of these were repeated over the next 5–6 Myr. Ammonoids and some other groups diversified rapidly, within 1–3 Myr, but extinctions continued through the Early Triassic period. Triassic ecosystems were rebuilt stepwise from low to high trophic levels through the Early to Middle Triassic, and a stable, complex ecosystem did not re-emerge until the beginning of the Middle Triassic, 8–9 Myr after the crisis. A positive aspect of the recovery was the emergence of entirely new groups, such as marine reptiles and decapod crustaceans, as well as new tetrapods on land, including — eventually — dinosaurs. The stepwise recovery of life in the Triassic could have been delayed either by biotic drivers (complex multispecies interactions) or physical perturbations, or a combination of both. This is an example of the wider debate about the relative roles of intrinsic and extrinsic drivers of large-scale evolution.
I don’t doubt that there will be life on this planet for a few more billion years but if we have already initiated a mass extinction event, and there seems to be a lot of evidence backing that up, then all bets are off as to whether or not we can stop such an event in its tracks and even less of a guarantee that any particular forms of life will not be completely extinguished. Though it is highly probable that at least some insects and arachnids will indeed survive.
Humans?! I’m not so sure…
The evidence continues to pour in from many diverse fields that climate change and extinction events seem to be inextricably linked.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12210-013-0258-9
The sixth mass extinction: Anthropocene and the human impact on biodiversity
Abstract
Mass extinctions are a major pattern in macroevolution. Because of their frequency, quickness and global effects, they shaped the global biodiversity several times during the geological ages. As an integrative factor with respect to microevolutionary Neo-Darwinian processes, mass extinctions are probably due to a set of different possible causes (basaltic super-eruptions, impacts of asteroids, global climate changes, continent drifts, and so on). An analogy has been proposed. If we compare the rates and amounts of extinction during those singular evolutionary events with the range of species losses over the past few centuries and millennia in human times, we see a similar trend. Then, according to a group of authoritative evolutionists like Edward O. Wilson and Niles Eldredge, we have evidence that humans are now causing the so called “Sixth Mass Extinction”. “Anthropocene” also means that Homo sapiens has become a dominant evolutionary force. Through a mix of different significantly impacting activities (i.e., fragmentation of habitats, overpopulation, chemical pollution, invasive species, over-exploitation of resources in hunting and fishing), we have produced the conditions for a serious extinction crisis. According to Nature (March 2011), the sixth mass extinction is under way: “we find that Earth could reach that extreme within just a few centuries if current threats to many species are not alleviated” (Barnosky et al. 2011). We discuss here a recent model for mass extinctions (the “Perfect Storm Model”), based on the idea that these macroevolutionary patterns could be produced by a mix of three main simultaneous causes and conditions.
Cheers!
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These creatures were once abundant… not anymore!
Habelia optata
Credit: Joanna Liang Copyright Royal Ontario Museum
Introducing Habelia optata from the Burgess shale. A long extinct relative of spiders, scorpions and other chelicerates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J27le3Ldel0
Royal Ontario Museum
Published on Dec 20, 2017
Short film showing the process of reconstructing Habelia optata—from fossil observations to the 3D model
Credit: Animated by Joanna Liang, © Royal Ontario Museum
More here: https://www.rom.on.ca/en/blog/habelia…
By scientific definition (see above) we are not in a mass extinction event, so think a little less apocalyptic Fred. It’s a little too early to start claiming the end of the world yet.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends-of-the-world/529545/
If Smithsonian paleontologist Doug Erwin is wrong, I will do my best to bring you some bottles of really good stuff and we can sit on the beach and enjoy the H2S clouds as they wash over us.
Whether or not we are officially in the midst of the 6th extinction, we have certainly degraded the ecosystems of the planet to an extreme extent. So extreme that the carrying capacity for large mammals (like us) is being greatly diminished.
We are living on borrowed time.
We are behaving like a fetus who pours acid on the umbilical cord.
Ron you are despicable- because, like me, you are human. Nasty fucking human. For some reason I like you anyway.
I believe in the remote past there may have been a Homo sp. that was non-violent, perhaps vegetarian, and less impulsive. We killed it.
population control
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wq_edHqpdA
85% have to go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdphbmIZ4nI
If Smithsonian paleontologist Doug Erwin is wrong, I will do my best to bring you some bottles of really good stuff and we can sit on the beach and enjoy the H2S clouds as they wash over us.
While technically he may be correct in that we are not yet in the midst of a mass extinction event, which would clearly mean we might lose up to 90% of all life on the planet within the next couple hundred thousand years. Nothing he posits precludes the fact that if we continue on our current path we won’t cross a number of tipping points that will surely lead to a sixth mass extinction. Not to mention the fact that we can’t be sure we haven’t already passed unknown tipping points…
Erwin pretty much says so himself.
When mass extinctions hit, they don’t just take out big charismatic megafauna, like elephants, or niche ecosystems, like cloud forests. They take out hardy and ubiquitous organisms as well—things like clams and plants and insects. This is incredibly hard to do. But once you go over the edge and flip into mass extinction mode, nothing is safe. Mass extinctions kill almost everything on the planet.
While Erwin’s argument that a mass extinction is not yet under way might seem to get humanity off the hook—an invitation to plunder the earth further, since it can seemingly take the beating (the planet has certainly seen worse)—it’s actually a subtler and possibly far scarier argument.
This is where the ecosystem’s nonlinear responses, or tipping points, come in. Inching up to mass extinction might be a little like inching up to the event horizon of a black hole—once you go over a certain line, a line that perhaps doesn’t even appear all that remarkable, all is lost.
So my question to you is, where is that line, eh?
You had better be prepared with those bottles of the really good stuff… I’m sure that sunset over the purple ocean waves, shining through those clouds of H2S will be quite beautiful and probably lethal as well.
Cheers!
Obviously, when one uses the term mass extinction, one is referring to the paleontological record of mass extinctions. The term is defined by the findings in the fossil record not by overexcited doomsters. Even more obviously we have not lost enough species to come anywhere near a mass extinction event. The megafauna represent a very small proportion of the species on earth.
Yes we are in an extinction event. To claim mass extinction is essentially waving the sign “IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD” putting those people in a rather niche group.
Where is the line? It’s not a line, it’s a multidimensional interdependent space time system called nature. If you have been paying attention to my comments I think the upper boundary of this event is a climate similar to the earlier Eocene period.
Of course this one is different, as I stated above it can turn on and off at the whim or destruction of one species rather than basic physical and geological drivers. This species may also have the power to reverse the course of the event or stifle runaway feedbacks. So the future of the event is extremely uncertain and now dependent upon a full interplay of all biological and physical elements of the earth system plus a primitive intelligence “civilized” set of manipulative creatures.
I see little indication so far of proceeding to the plus 10C to 15C region needed to get the deep methane clathrate converted to gas and the seas to anoxic mostly lifeless states.
For all those past calamities, both minor and major we still have many of the biological groups present across the plant and animal kingdom. Frogs have been around for 250 million years, fish almost 400 million years, crocodilians for 200 million years, mammals for 200 million years. All of them and more lasted in various forms through major and minor extinction events.
So Fred, you will probably just have to simulate the clouds of H2S yourself by eating too many beans. 🙂
However, you might want to reconsider your relationship with H2S.
http://time.com/2976464/rotten-eggs-hydrogen-sulfide-mitochondria/
Survey: Most people don’t understand science, want their kids to do it
John Timmer
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/survey-most-people-dont-understand-science-want-their-kids-to-do-it/
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/about-3m/state-of-science-index-survey/
3M, a company that views itself as research-driven, commissioned surveys in 14 different countries with a mix of developed and developing economies, and the results are pretty encouraging. Despite the many cultural differences, people consistently feel that science has an overall positive impact on global society, and they’re excited by what we learn.
But buried in the positives are a few areas of concern. Most people don’t recognize the impact that science has had on their daily lives and view it as something that their kids might be involved with. Yet younger people are more likely to view themselves as skeptical of science and not trusting of what scientists have discovered.
A strong majority, both globally and in the US, viewed scientific progress as being important to society as a whole. But far fewer said that science was important in their daily lives, and most said they simply never think about science. That extended into their views on the utility of science. People were most likely to say that research would have an impact on high-profile items like medical problems and clean energy. But far fewer suggested that science could have an impact on more mundane concerns, like poverty, unemployment, and hunger.
Beyond the confusion within the population at large, the survey also found that a substantial fraction of people labeled themselves as skeptical about science. This group was substantial, at about a third of the respondents globally. These people were on the wrong side of all of the confusion above: they viewed science and technology as separate and accordingly didn’t see any impacts of science in their daily lives. While they tend to be more common in the Middle East and Asia, they’re over a quarter of the US population. And, most worryingly, they tend to be young, with their numbers highest in the 18 to 34 age bracket.
Not surprisingly, these individuals are more likely to view science as boring and rate themselves as knowing little about it. But there’s also a large gap in trust, with 20 percent saying they mistrust scientists and their claims.
Science is fundamentally about how to think: how to understand the world, how learn about the world, how to create new things – it’s about how to be human.
Sad that most people think of “tech”as particle physics, or computer chips, when it’s *everything* – weaving, shoe making, finding a path to work or school. Arrows were high-tech for hunter gatherers. “Tech” is *everything*.
Most people are not students of industrial and commercial history and therefor can’t put together how modern times came to be .
When one sees a place name like Tannery, one can find old stone foundations buried in the forest. Those were the tanneries that implemented the destruction of huge amount of trees for their bark so that leather hides could be tanned and made into thousands of products like shoes, clothing, saddles, upholstery and even shoelaces. Now this process is done through modern synthetic chemistry in factories with no need for tree bark. Vegetable tanning is now down to no more than 10 percent of all tanning.
Linoleum: “Linoleum, also called Lino, is a floor covering made from materials such as solidified linseed oil (linoxyn), pine rosin, ground cork dust, wood flour, and mineral fillers such as calcium carbonate, most commonly on a burlap or canvas backing. Pigments are often added to the materials to create the desired colour finish.”
Now replaced by synthetic plastics, linoleum was another naturally sourced product. Linseed oil comes from flax seed.
Silk: a natural fiber that is still in production but mostly replaced by synthetic fibers.
Produced by killing insects after they weave a silk cocoon. Has a large carbon and water footprint compared to other natural fiber production.
Yes, technology is everywhere and in everything from the simplest to the most advanced. But technology advances like a flood, building upon what came previously. Which is why new things seem both so familiar and yet different.
Well you’re at it, don’t forget Gatling guns, cluster bombs, neutron bombs, weapons of mass destruction, hyper-sonic missiles… the new technology list that never ends.
You forgot knives, swords, maces, boiling oil, catapults, small pox laden blankets, blunderbusses, cannons, shields, castles, armor, poison darts, bow and arrows …
See Dr. Curtis Marean’s talk just past the 40 min mark.
ORIGINS: Inconvenient Truths – From Love to Extinctions (OFFICIAL) – (Part 01/02)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa1gZG6iOXI
Marean is a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the associate director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. He is interested in the relation between climate and environmental change and human evolution, both for its significance as a force driving past human evolution, and as a challenge to be faced in the near future. Curtis has focused his career on developing field and laboratory teams and methods that tap the synergy between the disciplines to bring new insights to old scientific problems. He has spent over 20 years doing fieldwork in Africa, and conducting laboratory work on the field-collected materials, with the goal of illuminating the final stages of human evolution – how modern humans became modern.
Billionaires Won’t Save the World — Just Look at Elon Musk
The “playboy genius” is essentially squandering taxpayer money on pet projects like Mars trips and flamethrowers.
Fake news for sure won’t save the world.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/02/18/tesla-subsidized-whats-truth-claims-tesla-spacex-elon-musk-wealth-exist-subsidies/
I wonder if the Musk-haters just have a bad case of “crabs in a bucket”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
All the “woulda’s and coulda’s” in the world don’t make a “did it”.
Your article looks like a red herring, sunnnv, since mine does not appear to be claiming that Elon Musk’s, etc., wealth only exist because of subsidies.
From your article’s title:
“What’s The Truth About Claims Tesla, SpaceX, & Elon Musk Wealth Only Exist Because Of Subsidies?”
That said…
Subsidy Tracker Top 100 Parent Companies
Elon Musk Wants to End Government Subsidies
But not his, naturally.
Lawrence Solomon: How Tesla’s Elon Musk became the master of fake business
See also here.
Caelan do you know who is behind that LA Times article? Why don’t you check the sources. Turns out it is the usual suspects.
Furthermore why do you say sunnnv’s linked article is a red herring, why is it less credible than the LA Times piece? Do you even understand what subsidies Elon Musk gets and why he got them.
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/01/elon-musk-we-are-not-getting-a-check-from-the-govt.html
Musk said that “none of the incentives are necessary, but they are all helpful,” referencing incentive packages some of his companies received to build factories in states like Nevada. He said that the reason these incentives exist is because “voters want a particular thing to happen, and faster than it might otherwise occur.”
“That is all that these incentives achieve,” he added.
Musk said that the only incentives he bargained for directly were state-level incentives. These include a small launch site in Texas for SpaceX and a Tesla gigafactory in Nevada. He explained that such incentive packages have existed long before his companies received some of them.
BTW, here’s how Elon Musk earned his fortune and how he spends it.
http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-net-worth-2017-10
How is it that you are not up in arms about the massive subsidies that the fossil fuel industry gets?!
http://priceofoil.org/2017/10/03/report-trumps-energy-dominance-plans-rely-on-billions-in-fossil-fuel-subsidies/
Report: Trump’s “Energy Dominance” Plans Rely on Billions in Fossil Fuel Subsidies
And that’s not even accounting for the cost to society of the effects of climate change and environmental damages
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ucenergy/2017/02/01/the-200-billion-fossil-fuel-subsidy-youve-never-heard-of/#190304eb652b
The $200 Billion Fossil Fuel Subsidy You’ve Never Heard Of
The U.S. emitted 5.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2015, with a cost per ton of $36 (the current Social Cost of Carbon). That means the U.S. is paying $200 billion to cover the costs of all the emissions being burned. In effect, it’s a $200 billion hidden subsidy to the fossil fuel industry. This $200 billion is a cost in real money—in lost labor productivity, healthcare costs, increased energy expenditures, coastal damages—that is paid somewhere in the world for each ton of carbon dioxide that is emitted.
I guess we should also add on another 200 billion in costs paid to cover last summer’s damages due to fires in California and flooding caused by hurricane Harvey in Houston and hurricanes Irma and Maria…
^ Fresh from Fred’s Factory For Fallacies, folks.
Anyway, maybe some of those fossil fuel subsidies are for pseudorenewables. Climate change and pollution? Fuckit. Onward and upward, and Syria…
Fred’s 100% right. And all you can do is spew facile insults? Go away, Caelan. You’re trapped in a mental bubble of your own making, unwilling to listen to the truth.
Tesla stock? Follow the money? Earth/Ethics for sale?
I’m pretty sure Elon Musk has never planned on saving TWAWKI. Nobody is going to save it, not even you with your pseudo anarchistic plan for world domination via permaculture.
Who knows, maybe if you contact the Koch brothers and ask very nicely, they will fund a greening of the Sahara desert project and put you charge. It has to be orders of magnitude cheaper than terraforming Mars. Just think of all that good CO2 plant food that would otherwise go to waste. You could extract H2O and N2 from the atmosphere and voilà, you have the next great breadbasket for the world! Just add a bit of circus and you will have guaranteed world peace and prosperity for the next couple of millennia!
You and the Koch brothers could share the Nobel Peace Prize! Just imagine how green with envy that would make Elon Musk!
A long time ago, for a class, I wrote a paper on terraforming Mars. If recalled, in the process of my research, I found out how each planet may have effects on the others according to their respective gravities and orbits and whatnot and that if we messed with terraforming by moving large enough bodies about, say from the asteroid belt, such as to increase Mars’ gravity and geological activity to help create and retain sufficient atmosphere, etc., it could affect/perturb the orbits of the planets. ‘D’oh!’
I guess Mars (maybe even Titan or ?) has already been ‘contaminated’ by terrestrial microflora and microfauna stuck to all those robot vehicles already there, ay? Tardigrades? I wonder what Christopher McKay would say or has said about that. Last I looked, he seemed pretty fussy about that.
It’s actually not a bad idea your Koch funding thing, so you try first, since it’s your idea, and if no luck, let me know and I’ll consider giving it a go. Or maybe we could both give them a call at the same time. Which brother shall we call first? Or might you have a preference for calling a particular brother?
Caelan MacIntyre,
The first soft landing on Mars was the Soviet Union’s Mars 3, on 2 December 1971. Mars 2 had produced the first man-made crater on Mars sometime earlier.
This tells me that there is life on Mars, via part of some Soviet technician’s lunch. Those bacteria are likely biding their time, waiting for us to show up, and I doubt they’re in a good mood.
The camera on Mars 3 sent back 14.5 seconds of featureless grey, if memory serves, before it stopped operating. A colleague at NASA Ames said it was obvious that a Martian had come up behind the lander and hit the Off switch.
Hi Synapsid,
Our sun going a slow nova might create a short Martian goldilocks zone long enough for the guys over there in less of a good mood to finally introduce themselves to any terrestrial descendants.
Yea, but we haven’t progressed much.
Fastest human flight:
Fastest. The Apollo 10 crew; Thomas Stafford, John W. Young and Eugene Cernan achieved the highest speed relative to Earth ever attained by humans; 39,897 km/h (11.082 km/s, 24,791 mph, approximately 32 times the speed of sound and approximately 0.0037 percent of the speed of light).
That was in 1969. We still haven’t surpassed it.
I could go on, but the period from 1890-1955 buries our current slow progress.
Last week (or maybe it was this week) that another financial crisis is likely. Since the article is behind a paywall, I’ll just post a few excerpts.
“Yet even though a big financial-firm collapse in the near future is exceedingly unlikely, another crisis isn’t. Bear and Lehman were the manifestation of deeper economic forces that since the 1970s have produced crises roughly every decade. They are still at work today: ample flows of capital across borders, mounting debts owed by governments, corporations and households, and ultralow interest rates that nurture risk-taking in hidden corners of the economy.
For a quarter-century after World War II, the world was virtually crisis-free. Widespread defaults during the Great Depression and the war left a relatively debt-free path for economic growth, says Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff, co-author with Carmen Reinhart of ‘This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.’ Capital controls limited how much money could cross borders, while rules such as interest-rate ceilings limited who could borrow and how much.”
I forgot to say this was in the Wall Street Journal.
Those few of us who have studied financial history know that financial crises are very frequent in an unregulated or poorly regulated financial system, such as that of the US in the 19th century… or the US today. So yes, we’re going to have another crisis.
Will it be like the Panic of 1909 or the Long Depression or the Panic of 1837? Who knows?
Wow! This is one absolutely amazing deep sea life form. What an amazing privilege to be able to observe it. Thanks to science and technology!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=anDIlMVgNwk
First footage of deep-sea anglerfish pair
Wow indeed.
Meh, beat me to it. Quite fascinating and gives a lot of insight into how those fish live and feed.
NAOM
HALF OF AFRICAN SPECIES ‘FACE EXTINCTION’
The actions of mankind could lead to the extinction of half of African birds and mammals by the end of 2100, a UN-backed study has said. The report conducted by 550 experts from around the world said reduced biodiversity could affect people’s quality of life. It also found 42% of land-based animal and plant species in Europe and Central Asia have declined in the last decade. The findings come after the death of the last male northern white rhino.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-43516211
The thought and language has to change before any real progress can be made. The natural world is not assets or resources it’s fellow creatures and life sustaining systems.
==Animals facing extinction==
should people care much about extinct animals? i believe the only animals we need are, cow, pig, turkey, chicken,some but not all fish, because that’s all food, then also bees for the honey. the rest gone wouldn’t be noticed?
Yair . . .
“should people care much about extinct animals? i believe the only animals we need are, cow, pig, turkey, chicken,some but not all fish, because that’s all food, then also bees for the honey. the rest gone wouldn’t be noticed?”
That can’t be a serious comment . . . can it?
Amanda —
“i believe the only animals we need are, cow, pig, turkey, chicken, some but not all fish….”
I recommend you go to the local SPCA and get yourself a puppy.
I recommend you go to the local SPCA and get yourself a puppy.
Doug, why on earth would you wish such profound cruelty on some poor innocent little puppy?!
Maybe get her a wading pool and a pet crocodile instead…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Heno_fPaWkY
True, but puppies love you even if you’re a moron. Pet crocodiles, maybe not so much.
That’s the point, humanity and every other animal would be better off.
Amanda.
Deep thoughts.
Imagine if all the humans were gone.
Would anyone notice?
Being homo sapiens, we will probably go extinct at a faster rate than most species (2 million years for mammals, where we are on the outside 300,000- it was 200,000 up until short time ago, and there is much debate- but that is another topic).
We will probably be one of those fast extinctions.
If the entire biosphere came together to vote one species off this little blue space island, is there any doubt which species would go?
“Sorry lawn grass, you’re outvoted.”
Now this video goes along with all this recent discussion of extinction. Note how not all extinct creatures were cute and cuddly or beneficial.
10 Animals You’re Glad Don’t Exist Anymore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp3wfNfuv5o
Prehistoric Extinct animals are fascinating. Animals like dinosaurs (T-Rex, Raptors, and anything else because dinosaurs are massive and ridiculous to imagine), giant bears, giant insects, and the Megalodon are just a few animals we’re glad don’t exist anymore, because if they did, the Human populace would surely have to take precautions against these terrifying creatures.
Featuring:
10 – The Host Eagle
9 – The Giant Turtle
8 – The Short Faced Bear
7 – Megalodon
6 – Giant Scorpion
5- Meganeura, The Giant Dragonfly
4 – Gigantopithecus, The Giant Ape
3 – Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, The Giant Sea Scorpion
2 – The Giant Milipede
1 – Entelodont, The Giant Pig or Terminator Pig
Try this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2Af9ne8zXQ
Note how not all extinct creatures were cute and cuddly or beneficial.
Kind of how most living creatures of the future will probably think of Homo sapiens once we are gone…. Especially the beneficial part.
Though to be fair we are probably playing a role similar to that of the cyanobacteria billions of years ago, when they drastically changed the O2 content of the atmosphere, laying the ground work for completely new ecosystems to emerge.
Setting the stage for the dawn of the polymervores.
Bob, we already have them, they’re called goats…
.
If only humans hadn’t driven the seagoats to extinction, we wouldn’t have this damn ocean plastics problem.
If we didn’t dump plastics in rivers and oceans we wouldn’t have the problem.
Not using mass produced petrochemically derived plastic polymers, in the first place, might actually go a long way towards achieving that goal. Holding the manufacturers, marketers and end users of the stuff financially accountable for the damage their waste streams cause the environment and the commons probably wouldn’t hurt either.
Not that I’m holding my breath while waiting for any of that to happen.
This is the world we live in today, Thank you Trump and associates, The Fossil Fuel interests and of the course the Utilities:
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/arizona-proposal-could-buck-clean-energy-ballot-plan/
New Arizona law aims to buck clean energy ballot plan
Republican lawmakers and the state’s largest utility, Arizona Public Service Co., had condemned Clean Energy for having ties to California billionaire and environmentalist Tom Steyer. They also said such a requirement would cause electricity rates to soar, a contention clean energy advocates say has no merit…
…In response to the proposed ballot initiative, APS worked with bill sponsor Rep. Vince Leach, R-Tucson. He said on the House floor Thursday that lawmakers must stand up against wealthy, out-of-state interests to defend the state’s Constitution.
“Arizona’s Constitution is not for sale,” he said. “Take your money and go someplace else.”
Rep. Ken Clark, D-Phoenix, scoffed at the contention that the concern was wealthy out-of-staters. He cited the billionaire Koch brothers and current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos as examples of big financial supporters of Arizona Republicans and GOP-initiatives.
“The lack of self-examination is staggering to me,” he said.
As parts of the US squabble over which end of the egg to crack, other parts move forward. The US is not the world nor is it unified in the use of fossil fuels.
ARCTIC WINTERTIME SEA ICE EXTENT IS AMONG LOWEST ON RECORD
“Sea ice in the Arctic grew to its annual maximum extent last week, and joined 2015, 2016 and 2017 as the four lowest maximum extents on record, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA.”
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-03-arctic-wintertime-sea-ice-extent.html#jCp
A lot of ice is going to be blown east and out the Fram strait this week, and than a +3 to 4K anomaly heat wave is due. In fact both Arctic and Antarctic are due for a +3K anomaly on the same day, I don’t know if that has happened before. The ClimateReanalyzer anomalies are against 1979 to 2000 average so there’s a bit more to add for pre-industrial.
The Bering Sea could melt out two months early, and the Central Basin and Greenland Sea, two of the only three areas that don’t almost always fully melt are at all time lows. With no thick, hard, landfast multiyear ice left anything can happen and depends a lot on the weather.
Hard to say “lowest on record” is very meaningful when the record begins only in 1979. Refer also, to what the commentators on that article are saying.
Let’s get this straight, through my high taxes I help fund NASA which in turn releases data which two non-Americans (you and George Kaplan) can look at and talk about for free?
You’re welcome.
I look at JAXA which is Japanese operated and partly European funded, and for weather ECMWF and Copernicus as much as anything, which are European and provide a lot of data for US projects. So as usual you have your facts completely wrong, despite having so much good information available.
George and Bill are both trolls, their main goal here is to disrupt the conversation. My guess is they probably use every loophole available to them, not to pay their fair share of US taxes!
It wouldn’t be so bad if they just once said something that was even remotely interesting and not obviously driven by self serving cognitive dissonance.
What really gets me is the truly idiotic perspective that the US taxpayer somehow supports all scientific research around the world. I have very little patience with ignorant rabid nationalism and xenophobia whether in the US or anywhere else.
So much for the purported Republican love of ‘free markets’:
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/3/23/17146028/ferc-coal-natural-gas-bailout-mopr?utm_campaign=vox.social&utm_content=voxdotcom&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook
WHat a complete misallocation of our resources…
Great! And just who is going to pay for this idea? How about Mexico?
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/03/19/wolovick-geoengineering-slow-sea-level-rise-polar-glaciers
Wolovick: Geoengineering polar glaciers to slow sea-level rise
Liz Fuller-Wright, Office of Communications
March 19, 2018 12:18 p.m.
serious research and investment, argues an international team of researchers in a Comment published March 14 in the journal Nature. Without intervention, by 2100 most large coastal cities will face sea levels that are more than three feet higher than they are currently.
Previous discussions of geoengineering have looked at global projects, like seeding the atmosphere with particles to reflect more sunlight. That’s what makes this focused approach more feasible, says Michael Wolovick, a postdoctoral research associate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and a co-author on the Comment. (Nature editors commission Comments, short articles by one or more experts that call for action and lay out detailed solutions for current problems.)
“Geoengineering interventions can be targeted at specific negative consequences of climate change, rather than at the entire planet,” Wolovick said.
Not all ideas are good ideas and not even all good ideas should be implemented.
Shoveling against the tide is a waste of time and effort.
What the world outside of the USA is looking like these days.
Hey Islandboy show this video to your local politicians and tell them this could be the future in Jamaica!
look mon, no more fossil fuels 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SEs9I9sptw
New Nissan Leaf e-Pedal & ProPilot | Fully Charged
Hey Fred, I’ve had a really busy weekend so I had little time to read much less respond to anything on line. I have an even better idea for showing my fellow locals what some of the possibilities are. There is a van similar to the one pictured below siting in the bonded warehouse of a certain dealer in used JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) vehicles, waiting for me to come up with the cash to buy it. I already own way too much solar PV equipment, bough when I thought TS was going to HTF, so when (if?) I acquire the vehicle, it will be getting a lot of it’s charge via free photons!
Strangely enough, I saw another example of this exact model on Jamaican soil last week Tuesday. The parents of a lady friend of mine asked me to pick up two shipping barrels that had been sent to them by someone in the US. Sending “barrels” packed with clothes and food is a big thing with Jamaicans with hundreds of “barrels” arriving every week. Apparently benefactors abroad want to assist folks here and prefer to send food and clothing rather than money but, I digress. Having picked up the barrels and turned west on to the main highway heading past the wharves, we passed an area to our right that was formerly part of the city municipal airport but been set up to store vehicles waiting to be cleared through customs. I glimpsed what appeared to be a vehicle like the one pictured below. What caught my eye was the blue “plug” graphic on the side so on Saturday, on my way back from west of the capital, I drove back along the highway past the the storage area adjacent to the municipal airport to have a second look. Another vehicle was parked immediately to the west of the van so it was impossible for me to see the graphics on the side while heading east but, turning into the airport access road and heading west on the other side of the parking lot, I spotted the front of the vehicle. It has a very distinctive appearance, similar to the Nissan Leaf with which it shares it’s drive train and battery modules (it has a different shaped battery pack from the car).
So rather than one of these vans showing up in the island, there are two! What is more, the JDM versions of this vehicle were built with vehicle to grid technology (V2G) built in so it should be possible to use the vehicle to store solar energy and use it sort of like how one would use a stationary battery. When I visited the bonded warehouse to have a look at the one that has been imported on my behalf, I did not remember that this vehicle is also supposed to have an AC outlet (100V 50/60 Hz for Japan) so I did not get to check if it was present.
I like it!
Too bad I’m an old geezer now and don’t drive enough anymore to justify putting money into a new car, or I would buy an electric car and a substantial pv system of my own.
There are simply too many ways for me to invest the money, places to put it that earn real and permanent returns, with the only DEPRECIATION involved being on paper at tax time, lol.
I think this same cost / benefit logic applies to understanding why the Saudi’s aren’t yet building solar farms on the grand scale.
I haven’t set up a pv system of my own yet because the price of the component parts is still coming down so fast that from a dollars and cents point of view it’s way better for me to be putting the money into various improvements on my place.
If I put in a big system, and made a modest few changes in the way I live, I could cut electricity bill by fifty to seventy five Yankee bucks per month, no more, without making serious changes.
That’s only nine hundred bucks per year. The total price of the component parts I want is decreasing more than nine hundred bucks from one year to the next, and every year I delay the purchase, I will be getting better quality stuff, so long as I make sure to buy the best quality, meaning longer warranties and fewer expensive out of pocket repairs later on.
Plus it’s going to be easier and easier to actually install a system as time passes, because the manufacturers are going to simplify and improve their stuff, and it’s going to be easier to buy everything all at once from one place all ready to assemble……… the way you could buy a house from Sears and Roebuck eighty or ninety years ago.
At first glance it would appear that the Saudi’s are now in a position to actually MAKE money by going solar on the grand scale, by selling some of the oil they are burning just to run ac during the day, given that the price of solar construction has come down to as little as three cents per kilowatt hour.
So …… IF this is right…….. Then they aren’t building solar farms yet because of internal political problems.
MBH probably has a dozen bigger and more pressing problems on his plate. If he succeeds in consolidating his power, and making all the other changes we hear about in the news, then it’s likely solar power in Saudi Arabia will go from the back burner to the front.
So far as I can see, there’s a TON of room for the prices of stuff designed to run directly on solar power to come down, maybe by as much as eighty percent in some cases.
I can’t see any reason why a twenty four volt DC pump motor should cost four or five times as much as a conventional 120 volt ac pump motor, other than that the 24 volt motor is still only being built and sold in very small numbers.
If you own an older house, and like it, your priority should be converting it into a superinsulated, air-sealed, vapor-sealed house with an Energy Recovery Ventilator. Having climate control which costs pennies is the best investment you can make in a house. That tech hasn’t changed much since 1981 when _The Super Insulated Retrofit Book_ was published so there’s no benefit to waiting.
Here is an article for the doomster set.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/09/this-is-how-your-world-could-end-climate-change-global-warming
Firearm Homicides in New Zealand, population 4.7M
2014 – 6
2013 -10
2012 – 4
2011 – 3
2010 – 8
2009 – 12
2008 – 7
2007 – 6
Firearm Homicides, Louisiana, population 4.7M
2016: 526
At least we are good at something?
Some people think this is a problem, others not:
Since 1968, when these figures were first collected, there have been 1,516,863 gun-related deaths on US territory. Since the founding of the US, there have been 1,396,733 war deaths. That figure includes American lives lost in the revolutionary war, the Mexican war, the civil war (Union and Confederate, estimate), the Spanish-American war, the first world war, the second world war, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Gulf war, the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, as well as other conflicts, including in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Haiti.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/05/us-gun-violence-charts-data
There have been over 3 million traffic deaths in the US and about 42,000 more each year.
According to an MIT study there are about 200,000 premature deaths (10 years less life) each year in the US due to pollution.
http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-early-deaths-each-year-in-the-us-0829
Of course how dangerous is the US to other nations? I would say the numbers of people killed by the US are large compared to the numbers of US citizens killed. Also being a huge nuclear weapons power, the kill potential of the US is global. Then there is the global warming kill potential of the US, an unknown figure but one that is probably considerable.
Of course one can turn this on it’s head and ask how many people the US has saved or helped over it’s history?
“There have been over 3 million traffic deaths in the US and about 42,000 more each year.”
Is that relevant to the gun control debate? Is the number of cancer deaths per 100,000 relevant to the gun control debate?
Sorry Doug, forgot this was not a free speech forum.
I got confused, thought we were talking about people getting killed by machines and weapons. Won’t make that mistake again.
Glad you are running the show, I withdraw from your debate. Have fun with it.
BTW, probably much cancer is caused by our machine/pollution culture. No one seems able or interested in determining the levels that I know of or doing much about it.
No idea what you’re talking about.
See your 11:57 AM comment.
This would only be relevant if you required a gun to get to work in the 1950’s, when the automotive boom really took hold, and mass transit (both local and national) started to disappear.
(Ya see, I know you can sometimes get to work without a car. But unless you are a cop, you can get to work without a gun).
We shouldn’t have allowed the mass transit to disappear, and we need to bring it back.
Efficient cars are great mass transport, we just need to learn how to share.
Actually, they’re not.
There have been articles about Uber taking passengers away from mass transit, and in fact adding to congestion (https://www.thestar.com/business/2018/02/26/uber-and-lyft-ride-hailing-services-are-increasing-traffic-congestion-studies-show.html). A bus or streetcar has the potential to take 50 to 90 cars off the road (while taking up the space of 3 or 4). Shared cars can never compete with that, even at maximum occupancy.
Wasn’t talking Uber. When you do the math and read the studies as I have done, you will see that a high efficiency car is more efficient than passenger trains.
Mass transit vs cars is a complex topic. I love rail: I use it to commute every day: it’s quiet, it’s safe, it’s chauffered! But outside of commuting it doesn’t work well – for mass transit to actually eliminate cars it has to go everywhere, and it has to do it 24×7. For most people, even in urban areas, that’s would be inefficient, impractical and expensive. Some important points:
Both rail and bus are less energy efficient than EVs (or even hybrids). That’s true at peak load, it’s dramatically lopsided for average load.
Rail & bus are needed for urban peak load (rush hour commuting) to deal with congestion. Uber etc are creating more congestion, but providing services that consumers love. Probably what’s needed is congestion taxation to incentivize Uber-type car pooling, which is available now but primarily used by low income folks.
Rail IMO is much nicer than bus: it’s mostly electric, it’s far faster and smoother. It’s what I use every day. But, buses handle the majority of passenger-miles in big city transit systems, they use diesel, and they’re much less energy efficient.
Trains and light rail take a long time to build. Rail would be astronomically expensive to build to cover most passenger-miles, and certainly couldn’t cover 100%.
Rail & bus are far safer than cars, but far slower for anything but commuting. They don’t work well for much beyond rush hour commuting and inter-urban trips under 500 miles. That’s not a really big percentage of trips, even for city-dwellers.
Personal transportation is needed 24×7, and reasonably close to users homes. Rail and bus are hideously expensive as a total car replacement for anyplace besides, basically, Manhattan. That’s due to the very low load factors at night, weekend, and away from high traffic corridors.
Well, bluntly, we need to make it harder to get guns, so that maniacs will stop killing people with guns… and we need to make it harder to get a driver’s license, so that maniacs will stop killing people with cars too.
That is the relevance, in my opinion. These are both massive failures of the US.
We need to concentrate on the biggest killers of people in the world, not just jump to the daily news stories.
Of course how dangerous is the US to other nations? I would say the numbers of people killed by the US are large compared to the numbers of US citizens killed. Also being a huge nuclear weapons power, the kill potential of the US is global. Then there is the global warming kill potential of the US, an unknown figure but one that is probably considerable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHO_bZMmdzc
Los Angeles World Affairs Council
Published on Feb 28, 2017
Dr. William J. Perry was the 19th U.S. Secretary of Defense. He spoke to a LAWAC dinner about why nuclear threats are greater today than they were during the Cold War. To learn more about Dr. Perry visit http://www.wjperryproject.org.
Of course things have gotten considerably worse since Perry gave that talk…
With Trump at the helm and John Bolton, the new National Security Advisor-designate for the United States
together with Mike Pompeo as the new Secretary of State we can all sleep soundly at night knowing that we are safe… though according to Perry a major nuclear war might also solve our global warming problem, win, win! /sarc
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/3/23/17155796/john-bolton-trump-mike-pompeo-war-cabinet
Vipin Narang, an MIT political scientist, estimated in a tweet that Bolton’s appointment raised the risk of war with North Korea by four times. Michael Horowitz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, responded by saying he had revised his estimation upward by a factor of five.
Nor is Bolton alone in his hawkishness. Trump’s pick for his new secretary of state, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, is a vocal opponent of the nuclear deal with Iran who has called for strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. More recently, he’s mused about regime change in North Korea.
Now go back to Perry’s talk and review waht he says about N. Korea and renegotiating deals with Iran…
Fred, having studied nuclear strategic and tactical plans and capability back in the 1970’s I fully prepared myself for being snuffed out in a few minutes from any point in the present or future. It holds no terror for me, I got over it a long time ago.
My only question is why do people in general fully tolerate living under such circumstances where they, their children and grandchildren along with much of the life on earth will just vanish at the whim of some leaders or by accident, yet still get highly incensed and angry about the most mundane perceived injustices?
Does anyone think that the multiple traps that “civilization” has led us into can be backed out of through use of military power?
First, my personal warranty has already expired and I’m not the least bit afraid of my own death. I’d of course prefer that it be either painless and quick or even better during sleep.
My only question is why do people in general fully tolerate living under such circumstances where they, their children and grandchildren along with much of the life on earth will just vanish at the whim of some leaders or by accident, yet still get highly incensed and angry about the most mundane perceived injustices?
I think Perry himself answers that question when he says the people simply do not have the slightest clue. But the lucky ones would be those that perish in a flash. Radiation poisoning is a really lousy way to go and even worse would be the slow starvation of those that managed to survive a bit longer…
Here is an essay by Umair Haque that I think might shed a bit of light on the why people seem to get so highly incensed and angry about the most mundane perceived injustices. Having lived in other countries with different cultures I agree with him that what we are seeing today in the US is quite unique to this society.
https://eand.co/why-were-underestimating-american-collapse-be04d9e55235
Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse
The Strange New Pathologies of the World’s First Rich Failed State
You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously enough.”
Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society…
…The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics. It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes. That is why our narratives, frames, and theories cannot really capture it — much less explain it. We need a whole new language — and a new way of seeing — to even begin to make sense of it.
But that is America’s task, not the world’s. The world’s task is this. Should the world follow the American model — extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue — then these new social pathologies will follow, too. They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.
Hopefully the world will see the disaster that is currently unfolding in the US, take heed and follow a different path! Unfortunately The US still has the potential to take out the entire planet while it is thrashing about in the throes of its collapse.
The current US administration, has withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, literally the only country to do so. It wants to remove itself from organizations such as the UN and the NATO alliance, It is putting up self defeating trade tariffs and withdrawing from longstanding global trade agreements. Anyone who thinks these kinds of actions will not have very long term negative consequences or believes that this is what will make America great again, is a fucking moron of the highest order.
We should be blaming the people we chose to have in business and government for the social living conditions today in the United States. Going out to protest to take away everyone’s right to bear arms isn’t going to improve any of these conditions. In fact, it’s not even in the best interest of the country because unarming ourselves is exactly what our enemies would want. Instead, if I was one of these kids I saw I on the news over the weekend, I would be protesting the lack of proper security at our schools as provided by the tax-supported and elected school officials in our communities and states.
If someone was shooting up retirement homes, you’d think differently.
Also, those kids had security on their building: human, fallible security.
They’re not stupid: they know that this massacre wouldn’t have happened without high-capacity magazines, and that security is no guarantee.
My son managed to go through grade school and high school without “Active Shooter Drills” or the fear of a mass shooting (he’s 19).
The reason is that I’m Canadian and you can’t buy magazines for more than 5 bullets for semi-auto rifles. Hence, almost no mass shootings.
So those kids aren’t commies…they’re Canadians in disguise.
My own opinion on this matter it that many people are propagandized by religion into believing in some god that at whim wrecks/destroys life on earth and who are told that life on earth will end in some apocalyptic manner. So the nuclear threat is merely a model god to them, an acceptable meme.
Far from the first rich failed state. The Roman Empire was one of the richest states in the world, and was a failed state for most of its later history.
How did it fail? The Servile Wars and the Social War tell us how: a rich elite refused to share power and took to murdering the representatives of the people. This led to Sulla’s dictatorship and eventually the collapse of the Republic (retaining only the outer forms) and a tradition of succession by assassination.
Read this then took my daily look at Wikipedia. What was the first item in the ‘On This Day’ section
“193 – Praetorian Guards assassinated Roman emperor Pertinax and sold the Imperial office in an auction to Didius Julianus”
NAOM
Well, it’s obvious Americans need even more guns than they already have! How else will they ever be safe?
We wouldn’t want to have as few deaths by firearms as that backwater Asian country known as Japan, now would we?
Japan has almost completely eliminated gun deaths — here’s how
http://www.businessinsider.com/gun-control-how-japan-has-almost-completely-eliminated-gun-deaths-2017-10
Although the US has no exact counterpart elsewhere in the world, some countries have taken steps that can provide a window into what successful gun control looks like. Japan, a country of 127 million people and yearly gun deaths rarely totaling more than 10, is one such country.
“Ever since guns entered the country, Japan has always had strict gun laws,” Iain Overton, executive director of Action on Armed Violence, a British advocacy group, told the BBC. “They are the first nation to impose gun laws in the whole world, and I think it laid down a bedrock saying that guns really don’t play a part in civilian society.”
Imagine that!
Small penis problem?
Three percent of the population own half of the civilian guns in the US
https://qz.com/1095899/gun-ownership-in-america-in-three-charts/
Hey- I own a rifle- better take a look!
Small penis and even smaller IQ problem…
Under a 1996 law, Australia banned certain semi-automatic, self-loading rifles and shotguns, and imposed stricter licensing and registration requirements. It also instituted a mandatory buyback program for firearms banned by the 1996 law.
Australia’s 1996-gun law reforms were followed by more than a decade free of fatal mass shootings, and accelerated declines in firearm deaths, particularly suicides. The nation’s homicide incident rate has fallen even more than the number of homicides — from 1.6 per 100,000 in 1995-96 to 1 per 100,000 in 2013-2014.
This was a big mistake. You’d be served well to pack a military style assault rifle for protection against poisonous snakes. Not as good as a long stick but more macho.
You’d be served well to pack a military style assault rifle for protection against poisonous snakes. Not as good as a long stick but more macho.
Just shoot a few rounds off at your boots before you put them on…
Kills snakes, scorpions, spiders and whatever else may be hiding in there.
My take is that, if you’re a parent, the best thing you can do is start instilling a healthy respect for firearms in your children early on. Take them to gun safety classes, where they will be able to learn all the proper handling techniques as well as determine that a gun all by itself isn’t dangerous; only the person behind the gun can be dangerous.
There was a news story I saw the other day about a program in Idaho that sounds like a reasonable solution to educating children about firearm etiquette. In the process, they also learn more about the freedoms they, as Americans, will get to enjoy once they reach adulthood.
These parents are taking their kids to shooting ranges to learn about gun safety
https://www.circa.com/story/2018/03/19/nation/these-parents-are-taking-their-kids-to-shooting-ranges-to-learn-about-gun-safety
How about this proposal:
You can only own guns if you demonstrate gun safety knowledge and good marksmanship, with quarterly gun range work required, and biannual marksmanship tests.
Sound good?
The first idea could be reasonable, but the other two would send us down the road of having the government run a gun registry, which would irreversibly infringe on the personal liberties the Second Amendment affords us.
a gun registry…would irreversibly infringe on…personal liberties
People have many rights that are mediated by government records: travel involves passports and drivers’ licenses; voting requires voter registration, etc.
There is no right more fundamental than voting, but everyone accepts the need for voter registration.
“Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in Heller noted that, because the plaintiffs “conceded at oral argument” that they do not “have a problem with… licensing,” the court would “not address the licensing requirement.” The appeals court in that case did, however, and suggested that registration was just fine: “Reasonable restrictions also might be thought consistent with a ‘well regulated militia.’ The registration of firearms gives the government information as to how many people would be armed for militia service if called up.”” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sorry-mandatory-gun-registration-is-constitutional/
While you’re at it let’s follow your logic and eliminate driver licenses as well. They infringe on people’s liberty to freely drive without oversight.
On the other hand maybe we should require that all gun owners get liability insurance…
Gun registry is totally legal.
In the days of the Founders, you had to store your gunpowder at a public repository — in other words, it was registered, and you had to record with the government every time you took some out to use it.
My take as a parent is that you are dead wrong!
You can pretend to be a patriot and for freedom, you can wrap yourself in the flag and the constitution and hide behind the second and first amendments but you are nothing but a coward and a scoundrel if you support the travesty that is the NRA and the gun lobby who put greed and profit above lives of our children.
There is no place in a civil society for hand guns and assault rifles, especially not in the classrooms of our schools. Firearms belong only in the hands of trained professionals, the police force, the military, the national guard etc…
If a civilian hunter want to own a rifle then they should be subjected to the most rigorous back ground checks with thorough physicals which include psychological and mental health status checks in order to obtain a license that must be periodically renewed like a drivers license.
If we want to reduce the number of gun deaths in this country we need to rigorously restrict the public’s access to guns, period!
If that offends you or goes counter to your firmly held ideology, too bad this is what I think! This is what I’m teaching my son and my family!
Enough with this pro gun bullshit already!
Your proposals are nothing but completely unrealistic ultra left-wing subversive schemes. Reality is…your side will NEVER disarm We The People of this Great Nation. For fundamental American rights cannot be put up for sale, negotiation or modification. Period.
If you want a real cure you should call for a ban on violence in movies/TV/video games and the internet. Then perhaps in 20 years or so the next generation of youth would have respect for ALL human life. We know that isn’t going to happen though because Hollywood would go bankrupt in a minute.
They are the ones selling shooting violence as ‘entertainment’ but then have the hypocrisy to say all guns should be banned. This shows the concern among the left isn’t so much about ending improper gun use as much as it’s about ending everything about America that makes it the shining Beacon Of Freedom people around the world look up to.
you should call for a ban on violence in movies/TV/video games and the internet.
Would you support that kind of ban?
Why would I write that if I didn’t support it?
Nick was just making sure that hanging yourself with your own rope was actually intentional.
.
If you want a real cure you should call for a ban on violence in movies/TV/video games and the internet. Then perhaps in 20 years or so the next generation of youth would have respect for ALL human life. We know that isn’t going to happen though because Hollywood would go bankrupt in a minute.
No, there have been hundreds of studies and no link has been shown between violent video games, movies and other forms of entertainment and real life violence.
Your claim is pure bullshit.
On the other hand the US with easy access to guns has the highest overall death rate by gun violence in the entire world. Case in point the Japanese play just as many violent video games as Americans but have one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the world. The reason is because their society restricts access to guns!
Imagine that no guns no gun violence!
Bringing another country into this debate is irrelevant. These other countrys don’t have the same political system we do, their people are dictated to as to how to live their lives, their politicians believe in socialism which means above all they do not & have never had the same freedoms we have in The USA. And honestly conservatives don’t much care anyway what other countrys think about our Rule Of Law in America because This is our country not theirs. If they need something to be concerned about they should be concerned about their own Homeland politics instead of ours.
Bringing another country into this debate is irrelevant.
That’s ridiculous! We compare ourselves to other countries in every possible other metric, why would we not compare how we are doing with gun violence?!
https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-by-the-numbers/
America’s gun homicide rate is more than 25 times the average of other high-income countries.
An analysis of gun homicide rates in developed countries— those considered “high-income” by the World Bank — found that the United States accounted for 46 percent of the population but 82 percent of the gun deaths.
Yeah, we need more guns!
Australians, Canadians and the British don’t have freedom, and are socialist?
If conservatives believe in the Rule of Law, why do they feel the need for guns for self defense? Shouldn’t they rely on the police, who traditionally enforce the Rule of Law?
Again its about these things which cloud judgement for those who want to take away guns. Things like other countrys NOT having the same political system or appreciation of basic Freedoms like we have. They can’t publish statistics for these kind of things because they don’t have a scale to measure them on but these differences matter alot because they set The USA apart from any other country.
Few places around the world allow their people to experience the types of Freedom we have in America. That means they can’t grasp our concepts of Freedom because they are use to big tyrannical governments dictating lives. Another word for that is Oppression.
Few places around the world allow their people to experience the types of Freedom we have in America. That means they can’t grasp our concepts of Freedom because they are use to big tyrannical governments dictating lives. Another word for that is Oppression.
Oh Yeah! Which is why I suppose John Bolton, the current National Security Advisor-designate of the United States, gave this heart felt speech on the right to bear arms, to the freedom loving Russians back in 2013. The Russians are certainly not known for oppressing other peoples…
I did love his saying that Americans need the right to bear arms because of the need to guarantee their survival by procuring food. Though the last time I went to the supermarket to buy frozen pizza and beer I paid with a debit card and didn’t really have to shoot anything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPM-FXHj5gA
Выступление посла Джона Болтона в день празднования дня российской Конституции
«Право на оружие»
Published on Dec 10, 2013
О праве на ношение оружия, 10 декабря 2013
Поддержи право на необходимую самооборону.
Вступай в сообщества движения “Право на оружие”:
Mossygrape,
Are you saying that other countries have fewer gun deaths because they have less freedom?
So…Americans have more freedom, and that makes them more violent?
I see some of our gun centric, marginally educated, little travel experience comrades love guns!
I suggest they get out a little more, and out of the US.
(at least we made it in the top 50- 43rd)
2017 World Press Freedom Index
1Norway7.60
2Sweden8.27
3Finland8.92
4Denmark10.36
5Netherlands11.28
6Costa Rica11.93
7Switzerland12.13
8Jamaica12.73
9Belgium12.75
10Iceland13.03
11Austria13.47
12Estonia13.55
13New Zealand13.98
14Ireland14.08
15Luxembourg14.72
16Germany14.97
17Slovakia15.51
18Portugal15.77
19Australia16.02
20Surinam16.07
21Samoa16.41
22Canada16.53
23Czech Republic16.91
24Namibia17.08
25Uruguay17.43
26Ghana17.95
27Cabo Verde18.02
28Latvia18.62
29Spain18.69
30Cyprus 19.79
31South Africa20.12
32Liechtenstein20.31
33Chile20.53
34Trinidad and Tobago20.62
35Andorra21.03
36Lithuania21.37
37Slovenia21.70
38OECS22.10
39France22.24
40United Kingdom22.26
41Belize23.43
42Burkina Faso23.85
43United States23.88
44Comoros24.33
45Taiwan24.37
46Romania24.46
47Malta24.76
48Botswana24.93
49Tonga24.97
50Argentina25.07
Hmm! I am somewhat surprised at number 8 on that list! Wouldn’t have thought that I lived in a country that has greater press freedom than many lower down on the list. On the other hand, the idea of some authority telling a news organization what story they can or cannot publish is completely foreign to me. I must add that there appears to be a fair amount of self censorship by the press to avoid the risk of libel lawsuits since we do not have an equivalent of the US first amendment in our constitution as far as I am aware.
We’re a majority — a vast majority, given that only 3% of Americans support the lunatic, extremist “every nutcase should have machine guns” position of the NRA.
We’re going to disarm you deranged, mentally ill gun nuts. You can give up your weapons peacefully, or we can kill you over them. Your choice.
I’m all in favor of guns held by a well-regulated militia such as the Black Panther Party. But even they had no objection to registration. Anyone who objects to registration doesn’t understand what the purpose of the 2nd Amendment was.
Nat,
“You can give up your weapons peacefully, or we can kill you over them.”
Now you’re making a sensible argument! That should really cut down on the violence. If you only have to kill that 3%, that 9 to 10 million should give a pretty good boost to the funeral industry as well. Might even give musk or some other forward-looking businessperson a kickstart into the electric hearse market. Lots of good potential in your solution.
Stan
My thoughts are, I think it’s quite dangerous trying to convince our young children, guns are the problem when the real problem is the mental health issues in the children themselves. If kids were still taught the right way with morals, to treat everybody as a friend, there wouldn’t be problems.
Keep in mind, which types do these shootings? They aren’t strangers to the school, they are fellow students who already know one another. For long term results, we need to control the mental health issues. In the short term, we absolutely must fund better security systems and protocols at all schools, along with training more school police officers.
Regards,
Ralph
Cass Tech ’64
So the US has much higher rates of gun violence because Americans are much more mentally ill compared to the rest of the world?
I think that could be a good explanation, especially with the way we are raising our children these days. I’m not a researcher in these issues, so I cannot say much for sure.
Regards,
Ralph
Cass Tech ’64
Do you feel that American child-raising has changed a great deal?
How do you feel it’s changed?
The American Conservative
Hillary, this one is more accurate.
Sure !
It’s pretty clear who you are:
https://memegenerator.net/instance/52363032/second-amendment-ralph-wiggum-im-a-militia
Get a clue. I actually support the 2nd amendment. *You do not, and neither does the NRA*.
The 2nd amendment was designed to protect groups like the Black Panther Party. Not individual ammosexuals who think they need a personal arsenal because they’re insane. The NRA is basically a front for gun manufacturers, trying to sell guns to people who shouldn’t have them so as to… well… raise sales figures.
Part-Time For-Profit Child-Raising Gigs
It would seem that if both parents are working, especially long hours, at multiple jobs and/or for peanuts, and their children are not accompanying them at work (depending on what we mean by ‘accompany’), then the raising of their children may be being outsourced, such as to daycares, elementary schools, babysitters and whatever else have you.
Then, maybe, the part-time ‘parents’ (or glorified sperm and egg-donors if you will), pitch in on the weekends, if they are not working then either, or not too tired to pay any attention.
IOW, why raise your kids yourself, when you have no time, but the money, and can do it by proxy?
Why even have kids in the first place if we can ‘distract’ all those potential moms with so-called ‘education’?
‘Beat it, kid!’
So Caelan, how many kids, either biological or adopted have you actually helped raise to adulthood? Personally, I doubt you could raise a gerbil!
If you want to get personal, Fred, perhaps your comment here belies something of what my previous comment might reveal of your own situation as a ‘parent’?
BTW, add ‘assorted electronic devices’ to my above list of what the ‘raising’ of our children are outsourced to.
My thoughts are, I think it’s quite dangerous trying to convince our young children, guns are the problem when the real problem is the mental health issues in the children themselves.
That right there, has to be one of the most insane statements I’ve ever read!
Fred, as a Floridian, what do you think of Gov. Scott’s response to the school shooting? I’ve read many accolades, particularly about the much needed school security improvements the state will get. The Governor was praised for his involvement in the hurricane recovery last year too. Now if he, as widely expected, gets into the senate race against Nelson this fall, do you think he has a real good chance of winning? I think he would be a very good addition to the senate since Nelson hasn’t always been business friendly over the years.
And a little comic relief….
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-rocket-man-blast-20180325-story.html
This guy actually built and flew his home made steam rocket to about fifteen hundred feet, lol.
This guy is either a nut case or a comedian with acting ability sufficient to keep a straight face when telling the world he believes the Earth is flat.
I wouldn’t personally, NOW, go within two hundred feet, make that three hundred feet, of a such a contraption once the process of charging it up with high pressure steam is started, unless it had been built by real engineers.
But on the other hand, I often rode motorcycles at speeds up to four and maybe even five times the speed limit on public roads, back in the sixties, when I was still young and full of testosterone and didn’t give a shit.
Thousands of people, mostly young men, engage in this sort of behavior every day. A few of them die in the process….. every day.
If you fly an airplane across the ocean, the first time it’s done, and survive, or die in the attempt, you are a hero, or heroine.
But do something equally dangerous, such as riding motorcycles this way, and the public takes you for a fool, lol.
Life is funny, sometimes.
For the price of a commercial airline ticket he could have been cruising at 33,000 ft looking down at the clouds while sipping chilled champagne… Some people insist on doing things the hard way 😉
Mr. Testosterone,
Funny isn’t driving 100 MPH in a school zone
US demands China reconsider ‘catastrophic’ ban on importing foreign garbage & recyclables
Heh. I hope this ban sticks. The US will be forced to start cleaning up its own waste; it’ll jumpstart the US reycling business, which has been undercut by exports to China.
Driver Of Tesla Model X Dies After Violent Crash Incinerates Car
Calean, why don’t you post a picture of every single motor vehicle fatality that happens on US roads every single day.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) 2016 data shows 37,461 people were killed in 34,436 motor vehicle crashes, an average of 102 per day. In 2010, there were an estimated 5,419,000 crashes, 30,296 of with fatalities, killing 32,999, and injuring 2,239,000.
Guess what? Teslas are cars driven by people on the roads, just like all the other cars on the road there is a chance they may be involved in a fatal accident.
Here’s one with two fatalities that wasn’t a Tesla..
.
And look here’s an ICE that caught fire. Gasoline is highly flammable and dangerous…
.
I wonder how much of your and others’ perception of reality is through a lens predominantly composed of fallacies, perhaps so second nature as to be invisible.
In any case, since posting ‘a picture of every single motor vehicle fatality that happens on US roads every single day’ is your idea, you are encouraged to attempt it in support of anti-car-culture agitprop.
See also, here.
Whatever makes you happy Caelan! I’d recommend you take a few classes in statistical analysis… It’s a lens you might want to try looking through every once in a while. You’d be surprised at how well it helps to focus in on the details of reality…
By my mention of ‘anti-car-culture’, other than you and Nathanael I guess, one would have clued-in that my ‘stats’ include internal combustion engine vehicles.
ROFLMAO! Shirley, you jest!
Don’t call me Shirley.
Caelan, we already know that your perception of reality is through a lens predominantly composed of fallacies. We wish you’d wake up and join us in reality.
The fact is that Teslas have driven 4 billion miles with roughly 7 fires (might have been 8). Assuming it’s 8, that’s 1 fire for every 500 million miles driven.
Gasoline cars catch on fire about once for every 20 million miles driven.
Reporting in a hysterical tone about Tesla fires is dishonest, unless you also point out that Teslas are 1/25 as likely to catch on fire as gasoline cars.
See here.
I have not driven a car from December on.
Living in a suburban wasteland has been challenging.
A new experience for me—–
Where are you located and what made you enter into this new experience? How has the experience been going so far? How long do you expect this experience to last and what might come after it, if anything?
Bend Oregon—
Its not like SF or New York- or even LA (all places with personal experience) where a auto is a liability. Here it is suburbia for miles and miles in every direction, limited public transportation, and idiots continued expansion. A fast growing cancer—– lets hope the next downturn turns this off.
New experience for me- I actually have a water supply from the city. And a lion hasn’t killed any local animals.
I’ve been through Bend from Vancouver (where I used to live) to Los Angeles and back by bus.
But yes, let’s hope the next downturn, which seems overdue, (although in this economic climate, what does that even mean?) turns this off. Best with the no-car thing. I totally understand and empathize with car-culture lock-in.
North America Insurance cartel, Firefighters, and the Edison Institute have seriously hobbled Rooftop solar with RDS – Rapid Shut Down. A rooftop solar array must go cold so firefighters can piss on the array. No firefighters have yet been electrocuted but now many fatalities will result from falls servicing unnecessary rooftop complex hardware. Same with Batteries in North American Homes cannot exceed 48 volts. One must consume Poison Grid Power. You have been assimilated.
Nothing like adding more points of failure! Do the automatic, LPG powered backup generators have to have similar protectors, be interesting to see the grid power cut off with the firefighters feeling safe… then the generator kicks in!
NAOM
The Earth has been assimilated, and, metaphorically, is one giant cube– essentially flat on all sides, maybe as per the Flat-Earthers.
BTW, did they assimilate the b in your nickname too?
Oh, also? The report you quoted is flat-out lying, Caelan. You should check what agenda the lying source has.
The driver (who was driving alone) was REMOVED FROM THE CAR and TAKEN TO THE HOSPITAL before the car caught on fire. I went through the details of this crash. The driver later died in the hospital from injuries sustained in the crash (no burns).
Your problem, Caelan, is that you are *credulous*. You don’t fact-check your sources. You hear what you want to hear.
The article-in-question includes updates/links from the CHP, Nathanael.
And the driver still died and the car, probably along with other cars, still got trashed, happy motoring car culture and all.
Feds Investigating Fatal Tesla Crash In Mountain View
NTSB will be looking into whether the Tesla, which crashed into a barrier and caught fire, had automotive control active.
Ghung, from the old Oil Drum days used to tell us how he greeted certain Utility meter readers who occasionally accidentally wandered onto his property. He would greet them with a smile and a shotgun and tell them they were trespassing. His home was completely off grid and he was just exercising his second amendment right to bear arms… 😉
Peak Milk anyone?
https://www.ydr.com/story/news/2018/03/13/milk-check-shrinking-and-pa-dairy-farmers-crisis-heres-who-blame/404710002/
https://www.agweb.com/article/low-milk-prices-glutted-market-put-strain-on-dairy-farmers–naa-associated-press/
Farming of any sort, except corporate farming, is as much of a lifestyle in places like the USA as it is a means of earning a living. Nobody who has ever lived on the land, and loved it, and loved the freedom ( other than from twelve hour days years on end ) that comes with being self employed, and loved the beauty and satisfaction of bringing in a great crop, wants to quit.
So they don’t quit, they hang in until they either die or go bankrupt. It’s a compulsion, rather than a BUSINESS in this sense.
And there’s not a big enough market for all of us, since improving technology forces us to scale up to survive.
The usual thing is that somebody, most often the farmer’s wife, goes to work off the farm, in order to support the family, and quite often, the farm as well.
But I have known dozens of men who worked forty part time in town in order to keep on farming. At least half of them are members of my extended family. My Daddy worked over fifty years in town, because the family farm was never big enough to generate enough income to pay for everything needed, such as health insurance. But we ate mighty well, and I never knew we were supposedly poor folks, until I got out into the world, lol.
Farmers are price takers, not price makers, with the exception of the big boys who manage to get the government to carve out protected position for them, with little or no competition. Domestic sugar producers are the biggest welfare bums in the industry, right now.
And the more price supports and insurance programs the government puts in place, the worse it gets, because such programs enable producers to hang on way past the time they should have gone into some other line of work.
I doubt any of the younger members of my family will ever farm, unless they make a lot of money in some other line of work, and buy a farm for the lifestyle.
I don’t know what I will do with my place. If a couple of young people who really want to farm happen along, I suppose I will rent it to them with the option to buy, owner financed.
Otherwise, I may donate it to an environmental organization yet to be chosen…… unless I get sick and have to sell it to pay medical expenses.
“My Daddy”
Sounds like you have childhood issues. I think we can add insecurity to your list of issues.
Hi HB,
I’m glad you’re hanging around, and continuing to make it obvious why the Democrats have allowed the Republicans to kick their asses and mop the floors with them, as a general rule, for the last few decades.
I make fun of you because you are a great example of somebody who thinks like your wannabe empress, with your head up your ass when it comes to understanding and respecting other people’s values and problems.
Arrogance and condescension put HRC out to pasture, and Trump in the WH.
Now since you reading comprehension leaves a GREAT DEAL to be desired, here’s a brick upside your head to help you get it.
My Daddy farmed because it was the work he LOVED, the way painters paint, the way musicians play, the way painters paint.
He worked in town mostly because it allowed him to get insurance for the entire family, and because it enabled him to make money enough to buy more land from time to time, because it ENABLED him to do what he loved best.
Now IF you weren’t hopelessly stupid, you would connect a few dots, and understand that when I say a man worked all his life in order to have medical insurance for his family, and that I support single payer insurance, you would understand where I’m coming from.
I’m the coach. I’m telling anybody who will listen how to win the ball game, next time.
You’re the whiny kid, the whiny parent, that will never understand that when you LOSE, it’s time to look at your own team, and your own performance, and do better.
You cannot control the opposition.
But you can play well, and win.
One of the cardinal rules of playing well is that you put the best players you can on the field.
You supported a loser, a candidate who had little sense enough to make fun of the very people who have always been the heart and core of the party she supposedly represented.
You supported a fucking bankster Republican Lite candidate detested, loathed, by half the electorate before the first primary ballot was ever cast.
I have less than zero use for Trump, but he was at least smart enough to understand the mood of the country, that people were tired of more of the same, and at least PRETEND to be on the side of the working people of this country.
The only way you know to build yourself up is to knock somebody else down.
This is a character trait that is very closely correlated with insecurity, but then you wouldn’t know that, just as you don’t know much of anything else.
If there’s any possible way to miss the point, then you will find it.
You’re too stupid to get even the simplest point I made. The market for milk, and most other farm products, is saturated, there’s no room for growth. Farms are necessarily getting bigger, due to economies of scale.
Bottom line, there are fewer of us left every year in places such as the USA.
There will be fewer dairy farmers five years from now than there are today.
“He worked in town mostly because it allowed him to get insurance for the entire family, and because it enabled him to make money enough to buy more land from time to time, because it ENABLED him to do what he loved best”
Hey Mr. Low Testosterone, HRC spent the first years of the Clinton Administration trying to get affordable health insurance for all and tried to work across party lines. Only to be blocked by, you guested it, Republicans.
“The Great Health Care Debate of 1993-94 ”
Derek Bok
Harvard University
“As the 20th century neared its end, the United States enjoyed the dubious distinction of having the highest health care costs in the world while being the only major democracy with a substantial fraction of the population still lacking basic medical insurance. On several occasions in this century, Congress seriously considered plans to provide universal health coverage. In each case, determined opposition led by physicians, big business, and Republican lawmakers blocked the proposals. With the election of President William Clinton, however, all of the auguries seemed to favor major reform. Rising health costs threatened to put American business at a disadvantage in world markets and thus made corporate executives receptive to a plan that might shift health costs to the government.
President Clinton announced the plan to the Congress in a widely acclaimed speech on September 22, 1993. In forceful tones, he urged the lawmakers “to fix a health care system that is badly broken…giving every American health security–health care that is always there, health care that can never be taken away. ” During the days that followed, Mrs. Clinton appeared before Congress to respond to detailed inquiries from one committee after another. Pictures of the First Lady sitting alone before a battery of lawmakers coolly answering questions on a subject of extraordinary complexity won her widespread applause. Moved by all the favorable publicity and anxious for reform, large majorities of the public expressed support for the President’s plan. In the words of TV analyst William Schneider: “The reviews are in and the box office is terrific. ”
http://www.upenn.edu/pnc/ptbok.html
Trumpster, your personal hate gets in the way of good policy. You have your head up your apple butter hole.
You got that “Daddy’s Boy” (Google image that phrase unfiltered Mr. Low Testosterone)
And then Hillary managed to completely screw up health care reform, and the public was very angry about it.
The basic mistake she made was, yes, “trying to work across party lines”. Same mistake Obama made. We can’t afford that shit any more. Republicans have proven that they will not keep deals they make, so Democrats who cooperate with them are… frankly, stupid.
Anybody have any NEW news about what’s going on at the Tesla auto assembly plant?
My firm opinion is that Tesla will manage to ramp up Three production substantially over the next few months.
But I don’t think any car company in history has ever expanded at anything like the rate Tesla has, and nobody else has ever designed cars from scratch that are as sophisticated, or that involve so much new technology, and so many new parts.
A typical supposedly new model from just about any other manufacturer is actually built out of parts that are already in production, and only minor modifications, if any , are needed, to use them in the new model.
Tesla doesn’t have that advantage. Probably eighty percent or more of all the parts going into the car are newly designed and have never until now been needed in large numbers on short notice.
Tesla making the wrong products. Nowhere to mount a 50 cal on a Model S/X/3.
Try to buy a Powerwall. Try to install one without an internet connection. Incompatible with almost everything. Good Luck!
Hey OldFarmerDickless with testosterone issues,
Below is why I feel you have your head up your ass when it comes to politics. Since your problem with politics is the focus of personal issues and not policy. Game on. Don’t get comfortable. Your a Troll.
“Trump Looks To Undo Fuel Efficiency Standards
The Trump administration is laying the groundwork to gut fuel efficiency standards for U.S. cars and light trucks, one of the signature achievements of the Obama era.
The EPA has readied a final determination that calls for the rolling back of corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards, according to the Wall Street Journal. The current standards would require automakers to sell vehicles that average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Trump-Looks-To-Undo-Fuel-Efficiency-Standards.html
If you feel the need to go on a HRC rant, grow up.
New cabinet members next week.
Drill Moore and Usitt Phaster
Trump in cabinet meeting: “where are all the cabinets?!”
Glad to see your Mommy hasn’t taken away your phone,HB
Yep, as far as sex goes, I’m pretty well dickless, as is the case for the vast majority of men my age.
But it still works quite well as a drain hose.
And I do HAVE one, even if it’s only semi functional these days, and I have lots of happy memories, lol.
You wouldn’t last an hour in the real world, where young men play the games young men play, and have played, since our first ancestor apes appeared on the scene.
But old as I am now, I can still go in a biker’s bar and shoot some pool, and nobody fucks with me. That’s because the old local bikers know me from way back when… when we were young.
Just about everybody who’s old enough to know shit from apple butter about getting old knows that testosterone peaks in your early years, and gradually declines from then on out, as you get older and older.
That’s what getting old is all about,the various bodily organs and systems wearing out and shutting down, but given that the height of your intellectual achievements seems to have been selling work trucks, I’m not surprised that you don’t know even this much.
I know more about trucks than you do, and that’s just incidental knowledge to me.
You’re not smart enough to even come up with a good insult.
“come up with a good insult”
Mr. Softie,
Setting behind a steering wheel. Bouncing your grey matter down the pot hole highways of the South, as you talk to yourself. Doesn’t constitute knowledge.
I’m sure your biker buddies enjoy an occasional visit by Daddy’s Boy in a round of poke the softie ball in the hole in a round of pool.
The difference between a man and a boy is the size of his toy.
Huntington. We may usually vote the same, but in your interactions with OFM, you prove that even democrats have members that are just as juvenile, ignorant and rude as Trump. Such an a-hole.
HB and OFM have gotten into a weird black hole together.
No fun for the rest of us, who I suspect are taking care to skip such comments as quickly as possible.
Hick, OFM is only being treated by the same means he treated HRC before the election. Yes, OFM is an asshole. You don’t understand what’s going on here. Let me know when you figure it out.
He is a political troll, no different than Javier is a climate change troll. Just as dangerous. I would suggest you take Nick’s advise.
You don’t take a knife to a gun fight
OK Huntington Beach. Pardon my intrusion into your discourse.
But you made your point so very loud and clear to us all.
And it is now time for those who would have preferred Hillary over Trump [a thousand times over], including myself, to move on, and start focusing on constructive tasks.
Such as finding a core set of policies and candidates that will have a chance of being embraced by the swing middle 10-20%. That is where the election hinges. Kicking mud in their face, or forcing transgender people into their bathrooms, isn’t going to help, in my not-so-humble opinion.
At Tesla: Model 3 production rates are up. The fully automated Grohmann line for battery pack assembly was only expected to start operation this week or next, so the smart money knew that production would stay low until the end of March. I personally believe that they’ve been using the time before that line got up and running to fix other identified problems in the production process.
As a result, I bought stock on the recent “idiot dip”.
We may find out what the next bottleneck is sometime in April; that will be information.
The Arctic permafrost holds several times the carbon content of the atmosphere. It is now somewhat clear that there will be continued melting and release into the atmosphere of carbon in forms of methane and carbon dioxide. Observing and determining the rate and extent of this release is critical to writing a lot more papers and fueling the climate “debate”.
Can we actually model the carbon cycle in the Arctic? Not yet, but scientists are working on it now, making some progress.
Memorable quotes from the video.
“A lack of predictive power in the carbon cycle models …”
How do last generation CMIP5 ESM’s compare? “Basically they all fail in one way or another…”
“Right now we are using simple first order decay models for decomposition ….” Speaking of the latest models.
Speakers
Dave Lawrence, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
Charlie Koven, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pUsJ-UiePU
Don’t fear the hydras.
As the climate system transistions to a new state.
Permafrost thaw might be even more potent than we thought
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCoo8MA4eI8
Making the world great again!
Driverless cars and bodiless brains
Fusion reactors: Not what they’re cracked up to be
If Luddite were a usable power source we would not have to try and achieve fusion power. Sadly, it seems the inputs are way higher than the useful output and there is no potential for ever getting a positive energy return. In fact Luddite seems to just absorb energy from society and produce no output at all.
Not to mention that whenever someone comes up with something idiot proof you can be sure that someone else will come along and invent a better idiot…
The number of logical fallacies in Caelan’s horseshit post above are too fucking many to address.
But the real story is ‘robot kills human’. Even worse, it happened as a seemingly helpless human backup driver looked on. The optics are the absolute worst imaginable for the driverless car industry…
trying to anticipate all the permutations of human behavior in the control systems for driverless car systems seems like a fool’s errand…”
He is obviously totally clueless about a number of things. Not the least of which are:
How AI actually works, and the simple fact that even in its current state it is probably still a safer driver overall when compared to the vast majority of humans.
The real story is not that “Robot Killed Human”, it is that “Idiot” stepped in front of speeding vehicle.
Case in point, airplanes still occasionally crash due to both mechanical and human error yet most of us would not think twice about getting on on a commercial flight.
From the always sublime Dara O’Briain:
I give out when people talk about crime going up, but the numbers are definitely down. And if you go, “The numbers are down”, they go, “Ahh, but the fear of crime is rising.” Well, so fucking what? Zombies are at an all-time low level, but the fear of zombies could be incredibly high. It doesn’t mean you have to have government policies to deal with the fear of zombies.
Let’s just stick with government policies to deal with idiots…
Nobody is asking why the safety driver was not paying attention. From the video it may have been hard for a real driver to spot the person crossing anyway. Many years back, we had a pedestrian knocked down and killed at night. He was wearing black or camouflaged clothes and a black balaclava. Judge decided that he obviously did not want to be seen so the driver was not to blame for not seeing him.
NAOM
Nobody is asking why the safety driver was not paying attention.
True!
One of the main reasons AI is safer than a human driver is that among other things, it doesn’t get distracted.
Caelan’s post contains this statement:
trying to anticipate all the permutations of human behavior in the control systems for driverless car systems seems like a fool’s errand…”
I’s say that it qualifies as the epitome of the Dunning Kruger effect.
It highlights a total lack of knowledge as to how the human brain evolved and how it processes information. Furthermore suggesting that it is a fools errand to try anticipate all the permutations in driving one would need to go no further than the possible combinations in a game of GO. Yet AI has already handily defeated the World Champion GO player.
Go ahead, (pun intended) and see how well you do in this classic attention test.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY
Daniel Simons
Published on Apr 28, 2010
The Monkey Business Illusion by Daniel Simons. Check out our new book, THE INVISIBLE GORILLA for more information. Research based on this video was published in July 12 in the open-access journal i-Perception. Learn more at http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com.
Even if you know what to look for I’ll bet you still miss quite a bit…
GM/Cruise is working to anticipate all the possible things which will happen in driving, through extensive and careful testing on the crazy streets of San Francisco.
Uber is just sending out cars running on junk software and killing people.
There is a big difference between these two, and it’s explained by corporate culture.
When an autonomous car can deal with the traffic around here I will have confidence in it.
NAOM
Fred, for once, you’re wrong.
All the “autonomous driving” experts stated outright that Uber’s car *should* have spotted the pedestrian and stopped.
Uber murdered someone. This is because it’s *Uber*. They have absolutely no ethics and absolutely no standards. Every other autonomous driving company is doing just fine; none of them have hit anyone — but Uber kills someone in a really obvious situation. Because Uber is reckless.
I may well be wrong about this particular case.
I haven’t really dug too deeply into the circumstances and I am aware that neither Uber’s leadership or it’s corporate culture are are known for caring much about people over their profits.
Having said that I’d venture to guess that they probably don’t want negative publicity let alone expensive lawsuits.
But my point was more general and I stand by it. We have ample evidence that humans process information rather poorly and that narrow AI consistently outperforms humans in many tasks.
Yes, there’s ample evidence that decent software does at least as well as the average human at routine tasks, and well designed software does better than the best, even with very complex tasks (at least those whose operations are well defined, like games and medical diagnosis).
Nathanael, your comment makes the most sense of any I have heard.
Not yet apparently, and if you don’t include Tesla’s self-crashing car.
Where did Uber get its self-crashing code? In-house?
The system breeds it. Looking too closely at Uber tree is missing the forest.
Gig economy? It’s the system, stupid.
(I don’t mean you, just using the expression as underscore.)
‘Luddite’ is a usable power source if we want to call living with real-time sunlight that.
So how exactly are you using real-time sunlight to post your cultist drivel here?
Are you rubbing twigs together to light the fire for the smoke signals you’re sending us? Because you aren’t allowed to do that, rubbing twigs to light fires is a form of advanced technology that rewires the brain and causes cultural change…
See:
How Things Shape the Mind
A Theory of Material Engagement
By Lambros Malafouris
Oh, sorry, reading books is forbidden as well!
How much time do you(/does your brain) spend in Flatland, Fred?
Clearly the idiot that is nature, or idiots that comprise nature, need(s) to adapt to ‘technology’, rather than the other way around, and stop allowing itself/themselves to get killed or somehow incapacitated by it, ay, guys?
Why technology? Cuz technology!
https://www.usnews.com/cartoons/donald-trump-cartoons
Unfortunately they are not numbered, so you have to scroll thru them to find the gems.
One of them has this Mencken quote.
““As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool …”
Accompanied by a caricature of Trump of course, grinning like the self satisfied fool he is.
The real question of course, is WHO is responsible for his election?
The people who voted for him, or the people who are quite upfront about accusing those voters of ignorance, stupidity, racism, etc?
Or they themselves, considering they are OBVIOUSLY so smart, having said so THEMSELVES, for nominating a candidate loathed and detested by half the people in the country before the first primary vote was cast?
It’s to be remembered that the R party establishment did everything in it’s power to KEEP Trump from winning the R nomination, lol.
Those of them who are honest enough to admit it now acknowledge that HRC over the years gained so much control over the D party establishment that only one person had balls enough to EVEN make a serious effort, an over the hill old man, who got a very late start, and who had to fight a losing fight with HRC’s lackeys in the party every step of the way.
But considering everything, he still captured the hearts and souls of the people who are the future leaders of the party…….. the well educated younger D voters.
The more committed they were to social justice, sound environmental policies, etc, the more likely they were to go for Sanders.
But the country was so sick and tired of BAU that the R foot soldier core deserted the party establishment, and went for Trump, while the D core either did the same, or stayed home, in large enough numbers to get HRC put out to pasture and Trump into the WH.
Remember children, when you grow up, you will look to your own performance when you lose the ball game, rather than blaming your loss on the opposition, lol.
RIGHT, HB?
HRC was so stupid and arrogant, so full of herself, that she expected the largest single constituent part of the D core to vote for her even as she campaigned with the banksters and globalism set.
Hey folks, it’s not just the factory worker who she scared into voting for Trump. It was the factory worker’s sons and daughters, the ones he slaved to put thru university, worried about their old Daddy having to flip burgers, it was the waitress at the diner down the road from the plant who feared the loss of her regular customers, ya begin to see a little DAYLIGHT, HB?
Let’s not forget that most of the new arrivals here are not well to do, and that most of our minority group voters, from our various minority groups of voters, whether they are a racial, religious, cultural, or sexual minorities, are also WORKING CLASS people.
If you want their vote, you must appeal to their economic interests as well as their political interests.
Insult them, make fun of them, paint them as ignorant, backward, uncivilized, unfit to be allowed to vote, and you are doing your own personal bit to elect Trump style politicians.
Anybody over twelve years old ought to know enough to understand this basic bit of naked ape psychology.
Right HB?
A note to the political side of this blog:
The political parties as we know them in the US are non-functional and irrelevant in the modern world. They can do nothing but harm. They do not recognize each other, they do not recognize modern global interdependency. They are fractured, incapable of grasping the fast fundamental changes that are happening and cannot respond quickly to any of those changes. Basically the political system in the US is a zombie system, it’s the walking dead and cannot achieve the aims of government in the present world.
To follow the current major political system, to promote the current political system, to spend time and energy on it is to become an ineffective and irrelevant person. To believe in it is to become a zombie.
Pepsi, and Pepsi Lite
I agree that our current political system is LARGELY nonfunctional.
But there are only two ways to change it.
We either work from within, doing whatever we can to bring about an internally generated political revolution, or we work from without.
I’m not a real historian, or a real soldier, or even a real academic, but I have spent at least as much time reading history, economics, and science as the average person my age has spent in bars, at ball games, and watching television.
For what it’s worth, I believe that the odds of success are far greater working from within than from without.
Revolutions from without are exceedingly dangerous, and often result in people coming to power who are even worse than the ones they overthrow.
But peaceful revolutions are possible, at least to the extent that a society changes direction, witness the English voting out the old power structure at the end of WWII in favor of a new one far more sympathetic to the needs of the majority of the people.
With the older generations that are culturally very conservative dying off fast, and younger and far more liberal, and generally better educated people displacing them at the polls, we have a shot, maybe an EXCELLENT shot, at voting in a government modeled on the ones that prevail in Western Europe.
Of course this isn’t going to happen in just one election cycle, but I just got the word that over a third of my high school graduating class is already dead, and within a very few years, that will be TWO THIRDS of us dead.
Our figurative lifeboat may sink before we make port, there’s a million things that can and might go wrong, over the next couple of decades.
But there’s hope.
I’m not saying that a Western European model government will move fast enough to save us from our long history of accumulated bad decisions, but it would at least make a real effort to turn things around economically and environmentally.
The first thing one must realize, if he intends to work within the system, is that as GF pointed out, both parties are dysfunctional, and a truly major revolution within the parties must occur for real and useful change to occur.
The second thing is that the Democratic party is the one best situated and likely to manage this change, and that makes the best hope for change to work within the current D party, getting rid of the BAU bankster corporate type Democrats, gradually, and replacing them with Democrats who know how to appeal to everybody, not just one percenters and special interest groups and the various minorities that rightfully and reasonably owe their allegiance to the Democrats, and vote that way…….. at least until they begin to feel betrayed by the Democrats.
There are thousands of minority people in my part of the country who lost their jobs when we exported our textiles and furniture industries.
More than a few of them are really pissed at the Democrats right now, because they believe the Democrats are responsible. This is only partially true, it’s mostly the fault of the Republicans, and the consequence of economic reality, but one must remember this:
Facts don’t matter in the voting booth. The voter marks his ballot according to his BELIEFS.
Votes merely assist the current paradigm which is living in the past at best and pathological at worst. People need to vote with their actions, change what is needed to be changed by their time, money, smarts and effort. They need to disconnect from the current paradigm as much as possible. They also need to disconnect from the internet and cellphones as much as possible or at least learn ways to use it covertly.
Of course there will be little hope left once the AI systems figure us out. Determining human response and action even slightly better than people themselves will be enough of an edge for corporations and government to take control. At that point the corporations and government will be one or two steps ahead of us most of the time. I give us less than a decade before that happens in general.
We have one thing going for us, the system is out of control now. It is running mostly on it’s own and being band=aided together or struggled against (by the stupid). No one is really running the show any longer. There is a power vacuum for a short time.
Some food for thought:
https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21739161-nickel-could-make-good-substituteprovided-car-batteries-dont-catch-fire-what-if
History ain’t over folks, regardless of how rosy the tint of one’s neoliberal new glasses may be.
It’s existentially dangerous, or close to it, to be dependent on foreign sources of absolutely critical inputs such as oil, iron ore, food, aluminum……… and before too long, perhaps cobalt too.
Sky Daddy himself would have a hell of a time saving Western Europe from an economic catastrophe if the Russians were to ever shut down their oil and gas exports.
Anybody who thinks it will never happen, who is CONFIDENT it will never happen, is naive, to put it as mildly as possible, as the result of his ignorance of history.
We need to be thinking about making sure we have suppliers of cobalt, tungsten, and various other mineral resources that are REALLY our friends, and implement policies that make it possible to have at least a core industry producing these materials within our own countries whenever possible. A small industry can be ramped up years and years quicker than it can be started from scratch.
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Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston – Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Temple,_3rd_Viscount_Palmerston
“I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow… And if I might be allowed to express in …”
Anybody who is knowledgeable enough in the hard sciences to understand our climatic and environmental problems is certainly possessed of brains enough to understand the implications of this quote…. unless his political prejudices preclude such understanding.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ‘ripped a 559-mile hole’ in the atmosphere
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/elon-musks-spacex-falcon-rocket-launch-ripped-a-559mile-hole-in-the-atmosphere-a3799091.html
But who needs it– we will soon be living on Mars.
Interesting, I wonder how it affects terrestrial bounce communications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_burst_communications
Mr. Magyar, I think you missed my comment for you from earlier. http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-march-21-2018/#comment-633852 As a non-Floridian myself, I was interested in your perspective on the crucial senate election in Florida this fall, as Nelson initially wasn’t on the lists of most vulnerable senators this cycle, but will be if Scott gets into the race, and that could mean Democrats lose 3-5 seats.
Zabzaz,
To be frank I was not all that impressed with the governor’s response to the Parkland shooting. I’d say it was typical of most of our politicians in this day and age. A dollar short and a day too late. If you have read my recent comments you already know my opinion of the NRA and the gun lobby.
Suggesting that arming teachers is any kind of solution is what I would call absolutely bonkers.
As for Nelson, while I’m registered as an independent and he supposedly holds a slight lead over Scott especially among independent voters I’m not a great fan of his either. I don’t see a huge difference between the current Remocrats and the Depublicans. I think the political system is quite ripe for radical change. Of course that has some dangers of it’s own.
If it were up to me I’d like to see some totally fresh faces in our national and local politics. Maybe I will live long enough to be able to vote for some of those young students who organized the latest “March for Our Lives”. They seem to have a new found voice and understand the need for systemic paradigm change in our country. I hope that when they are full grown members of society, some of them will choose to serve in public office.
As far as national politics, I’d guess you probably don’t see any good options among the likely 2020 presidential candidates then?
No, not really. I think that much as in the recent past, it will probably be a choice between the lesser of two evils. And to be clear, I’m not specifically referring to the 2016 elections. I consider that to have been an outlier. IMO the system has been dysfunctional for a while. It doesn’t work for the majority of the people.
Case in point, the US is the only supposedly wealthy western nation that seems incapable of providing basic universal health care to its people. Many countries that the US deems third world, have been able to do so. Some have actually written it into their constitutions as a basic human right. Neoclassical economic theory has proven to be a complete failure.
Despite porn stars and Playboy models, white evangelicals aren’t rejecting Trump. This is why.
by Andrew L. Whitehead, Joseph O. Baker and Samuel L. Perry
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/03/26/despite-porn-stars-and-playboy-models-white-evangelicals-arent-rejecting-trump-this-is-why
Why are white Christians sticking so closely to President Trump, despite these claims of sexual indiscretions? And why are religious individuals and groups that previously decried sexual impropriety among political leaders suddenly willing to give Trump a “mulligan” on his infidelity?
Our new study points to a different answer than others have offered. Voters’ religious tenets aren’t what is behind Trump support; rather, it’s Christian nationalism — their view of the United States as a fundamentally Christian nation.
Many voters believed, and presumably still believe, that regardless of his personal piety (or lack thereof), Trump would defend what they saw as the country’s Christian heritage — and would help move the nation toward a distinctly Christian future. Ironically, Christian nationalism is focused on preserving a perceived Christian identity for America irrespective of the means by which such a project would be achieved.
Hence, many white Christians believe Trump may be an effective instrument in God’s plan for America, even if he is not particularly religious himself.
In the upcoming midterm elections, Trump and other politicians will keep emphasizing Christian nationalism. After all, it works.
In other words, they recognize that a politician’s policies are what matter, and that their personal life is irrelevant.
Now, if only these voters had good information, and knew just how bad Trump’s policies are for them…
“Why are white Christians sticking so closely to President Trump, despite these claims of sexual indiscretions?”
Because Christians don’t give a flying fuck about violations of their morality or rules as long as it furthers their agenda.
And it’s been that way forever.
Example:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pious_fraud
Gerry says- “Because Christians don’t give a flying fuck about violations of their morality or rules as long as it furthers their agenda.
And it’s been that way forever.”
Absolutely true. Genocide has been a specialty. Exterminate those who won’t convert. Steal the best farmland, the minerals, and the forests.
I don’t think the theology has worked very well at all at helping to create good people/cultures. Massive, massive failure.
So many Christians, so few lions.
The whale and the elephant in the room, those least spoken about, are population and consumption.
With US population decrease being masked by immigration and Europe, especially eastern Europe, on the decrease it is Africa and Asia that will provide the big surge of people toward an additional two billion.
Africa is predicted to lead the way. I have no idea how they will sustain such growth.
https://qz.com/1016790/more-than-half-of-the-worlds-population-growth-will-be-in-africa-by-2050/